Hi Cristian,
thank you for your interest in Icelandic! Icelanders in
general are
very proud of their language. Since Iceland is very
isolated (being an
island in the middle of the Atlantic), Icelandic is the
modern language
that most resembles the common Nordic language that once
was spoken in
Scandinavia and the northern parts of the British isles.
I have actually given this issue some thought and
although it would
certainly be heartwarming to have Icelandic in the list
of translations
of the Debian installer, my conclusion is that it is
hardly worth the
effort for the following reasons.
1) Icelanders are about 290.000, of which probably over
80% use
computers. Last time I looked 95% of the worlds PCs ran
windows so
Linux usage in Iceland is certainly below 5%. I
remember some statistics
for servers that show that Debian is run on about 20% of
Linux boxes.
Thus adding up the numbers I find an upper limit of
290.000*0.8*0.05*0.2 = 2320
Debian users in Iceland. (My gut feeling, based among
other things on
the traffic on this mailing list, is that this is a
gross overestimate).
2) Since Icelandic is useless outside Iceland a great
majority of
Icelanders speak English fluently. Each and every one
of those
Debian users is part of that majority.
3) The translation of technical documents (like the
Debian installer)
to Icelandic would involve "inventing" a lot of words
that are currently
lacking in Icelandic. Although this is considered a
noble trade in
Iceland, the result is that the Icelandic installer
would actually be
less understandable to the target audience than the
English version.
Most users would thus prefer the English one anyway
(this is my own
experience with such translations).
4) Since such little demand is for the translation, the
danger is that it
will be poorly maintained and thus be a baggage to the
overall project.
I hate to sound so pessimistic but I think I am being
reasonable.
Just to bring the info into the discussion: How much
work is actually
involved in the translation?
I would love to hear more opinions from others on this
list since the
question of translations is a rather fundamental one for
Icelandic
free software users.
All the best,
Kristinn B. Gylfason
On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 10:26:41AM +0200, Christian
Perrier wrote:
Just discovering this list....
I send this mail just to see if some icelandic-speaking
users/developers would be interested in working on the
Icelandic
translation of the Debian Installer. Icelandic is now
among the very
rare european languages for which no translation
currently exists and
all subscribers in this list (if there are some) will
agree that this
is a shame..:-)
Please keep me CC'ed to answers.