31 Oct 2000 gwm   » (Master)

Today I sympathize with KDE. In the past, I have been very hostile to it, but the imense quantity of high quality translations to a a impressive number of languages has enchanted me. Human languages are very interesting and important cultural marks to be ignored in favor of some "English is enough" philosophy. My comments are based purely on my perception, and may be very unfair, but Gnome doesn't get anywhere near KDE with regard to cultural respect. This is probably because Gnome is mostly based in the US, and KDE mostly in Europe, and Americans have this awfully stupid idea that "Everyone knows English".

Brazil is even worse when it comes to languages - the US at least has millions of immigrants who take their cultures with them, but Brazil is a Portuguese-only country. There are no major groups speaking any other language. The Brazilian computer culture has widely adopted English, though, (even if not everyone's ability with English is great, as you can see in this diary entry) and demonstrated very little respect for Portuguese while at it. Years of 8-bit unclean code and incompatible character sets have given place to a horrible byproduct of written Portuguese, with all accents ignored or at least changed to a informal two-character encoding set. The relative verbosity of Portuguese (English is so compact) caused people to invent a number of ugly abbreviations.This entire scenario means many Brazilians, even in their blissfully monolingual country actually prefer English to Portuguese on their computer screens. Low quality localized software plays a great role in this - I have been advised to stick with the English version of MacOS on my Macintosh, for example. Gnome is also a great example of this - yes, Gnome comes with gettext support, but this is only a small part of the game. A gmc window, for example, has buttons with descriptions, and the lenght of these descriptions defines the minimal width of a window. With gmc properly translated to Portuguese the windows won't fit into 640x480, and will take considerable screen space on 800x600. This isn't exactly attractive, and if the translators didn't invent some alternative though not very proper terms, this could be a very good reason for not using Portuguese at all.

This decayed descendent of English and Portuguese that's used in Brazil is actually one major obstacle to popular adoption of computing. Nobody wants to learn a new language (and another culture) before sitting in front of computer, and a technical conversation is probably not even possible without using a number of English words. And even people who can at least read English shouldn't want to see a non-native language on their screens, nor settle with low-quality localized software. KDE is a great environment, and it is culturaly respectful at least to the cultures I care about. Maybe Gnome will be successful in the US, but everywhere else it can't match KDE.

But then, I'm only whining, I may be completely wrong and unfair to the hard work of a number of people, I don't follow nor contribute to either project, and my text is extremely confusing - I intended only to talk about how cool KDE's translations are when I started.

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