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Re: Regular use of software translated into "Esperanto"?



You would be wrong here. Esperanto is actively used every day, and a good amount of people use their system in Esperanto, too. You can see this because everything that permits community translation generally has people at some point starting a translation. TEJO, a youth NGO working on EU and UN level, has an office using Linux computers in Esperanto and software in Esperanto enables the usage of these computers by all people in the office. There are other organizations too. Also, by having an Esperanto version you often enable other minority language versions where people have difficulties learning English. This is exactly what happened with the Ipernity project, where the Czech and Chinese version were done using the Esperanto version as a pivot language. There are also about 200 - 2000 people who have Esperanto as one of their native languages. Also you have to realize that Esperanto is both easier to learn and easier to get translated than many local languages, so it does provide access even to people outside of the community.

It's hard to give an accurate number of users of software in Esperanto. I do know that many projects have teams of over 10 people translating, so the people using the translation is probably a good amount higher than that.

You are right that people often have to actively select the Esperanto version, and whenever possible I always do. It's not a statement, it's a way to get the people you need to be accessible in big non-English markets to care about your project and often help you out even for free for those languages too.


On June 21, 2023 at 8:12 GMT, c buhtz <c.buhtz@posteo.jp> wrote:

Hello folks,

I know not much about Esperanto, only what I can read at Wikipedia.

I'm member of the upstream maintenance team of "Back In Time" [1][2].
Currently the project do partly offer Esperanto [3]. Because of
ressourrces and maintainability I think about removing that language
from the project. You might helping me understanding some points about
Esperanto.

I wonder if Esperanto speaking people do use there software that way? I
know that Debian offers Esperanto. Do you know about how many users this
are?

Please correct me if I'm wrong here. To my knowledge Esperanto is a
foreign (not mother tongue) language to the most people even the
Esperanto speakers them self. But some do grew up with Esperanto and it
is their mother tongue language. But it keeps their secondary mother
tongue language. They grew up in countries where Esperanto isn't the
primary language. Is there any country where it is primary language?

Am I right so far?

So I wonder if it make sense to translate the GUI of a software into
Esperanto.

From a technological point of view: In most cases (except the Esperanto
Debian users) the system language isn't Esperanto? So Esperanto isn't
selected by default when installing a software. You have to explicit
choose that in the settings of a specific software. Right?

Of course from the cultural and political perspective it make sense as a
"statement". It could be compared to translate software into minority
(e.g. Native American languages) or "forgotten" languages. But my
project don't have the resources for "statements".

Hope you can clear up some of that.

Kind
Christian

[1] -- <https://github.com/bit-team/backintime>
[2] -- <https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/backintime>
[3] -- <https://translate.codeberg.org/projects/backintime/common/eo/>




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