Freedom to translate!

19Nov08

One of the great joys of free software is that you can have a look into the code and actually change it. If something is wrong, and obviously, you have enough knowledge to do so, you can solve the problem by yourself. Around free software big networks of volunteers were formed, not only composed of developers but of translators. Access to the code means that people, whomever it is, is able to translate that piece of free software he or she like so much into his or her language.

Actually free software communities have understood that localization, the process of making software working in some language, is essential and translators have been encourage to join and actually are intensively working inside those free software projects. I say essential because users want software they are able to fully understand, and most of people don’t know English (all software is written first in English and then translated). Unless you are Chinese, would you use software written in Chinese?.

Obviously private software translate its products as well. We can obtain copies of Windows Vista, not to say of Windows XP, in a good bunch of languages. The same applies to Mac OS X Leopard and other popular software produced in-house by different business companies. But how does it compare? How well does free software does it if compared to private software?. Is it translated to more languages?. Does it cover more people?. I’ve asked this myself before and I have an answer.

We can say that OSs give us a good picture of what’s actually happening in localizations. They are arguably the most universally used piece of software, right?. Translating is very expensive, very!. Indeed, the cost of translation may be equal or bigger than the actual software development cost. So, companies choose a limited number of language and focus their resources into translating some specific languages. This is called optimization, by the way. Windows Vista is fully translated to 35 languages and Mac OS X Leopard to 15 languages, according to their respective technical web pages. Which languages do they translate to? English, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean… You guess it!. Those products are translated to the most relevant languages of the globe; some because they are spoken by hundreds of millions of people and other because they are spoken in important and industrialised countries. Most of that languages have something in common, they are part of the Indo-European language family. This is not accidental. Indo-European languages are native language to people from Europe to India and due to the colonial empires period (Spanish and Portuguese Empires first, French, Italian, Dutch, Belgian, German and English Empire later), its geographical influence expanded greatly in the last five centuries. But, though they try to reach lots of people, they are still forgetting a lot of languages. Though I won’t give enough information right now but in next posts, they are primarily focusing on healthy languages of industrialised countries, and this is, they are approaching their market. Something which is rather obvious.

But free software simply doesn’t mind neither understands about markets. Free software doesn’t care if Wall Street is in free fall. In the kingdom of free software reigns the freedom to translate as volunteers are only driven by they will to do the work. Free software is not like closed source software, private software: there’s nothing we can directly compare to Windows Vista, for instance. A full free software system runs a distributions who has some specific kernel, and Linux is the best known and most used of them all, and a desktop environment. While there’s nothing to translate in the kernel, and very little* in the distribution, the translation of the desktop environment is the most relevant part of the localizations in free software (* compared, usually a desktop environment’s translation is 10 to 12 times the translation of a distro) and is what it’s best to compare to a private OS. Whatever it is the distribution you choose they will include one of the two big desktop environment players: KDE and GNOME and, furthermore, distros can be very popular in some regions but not in others (think of Turbolinux or Redflag, for instance), so, no!, a distro is not suitable for the comparison I want to do.  So, who is doing it better?. The last version of KDE and GNOME, KDE 4.1 and GNOME 2.24 have been successfully translated into 44 and 49 languages respectively**. So, numerically, free software takes the lead. But, if we look at the languages they have been translated into we can see languages like Italian, German, Spanish, Finnish, Dutch, Polish, Bengali, Tatar, Tamil, Galician, Xhosa, Hausa, Frisian, Uzbek… Do you see the difference?.

Another interesting question is, who reach more users in their native language?. Not second language, first language!. Well, private software can potentially be used by millions of users, Windows Vista is there for something like 60% of world population (in native language)!, only with 35 languages. Amazed?. KDE is already covering as much people and GNOME is there approx. for 70% of world population!. But, KDE, GNOME and a third player, XFCE are being translated to more languages right now, that haven’t produced yet a full localization. There’s 106 language teams in KDE, 101 in GNOME and 54 in XFCE. What if all those languages had their translations done by now?. XFCE would get to  the 70% and KDE and GNOME would reach out to 80-90% of World population in native language. This is really amazing!. What marks the difference between private software and free software is the participation of volunteers in the process who can freely collaborate. Those volunteers are right now translating to languages that private software have never even think of, like Frisian, Faroese, Guarani or Sami. Welcome to a localized globalised World!.

In next posts I’ll be expanding all this statistics regarding to localization focusing on different aspects. Please, stay tuned.

Notes: All errors that I might have committed gathering the data used to create the graphic are absolutely unintentional, I do not intend to attack any of the trademarks mentioned above but to highlight the benefits of free software. If you find errors, I’d gladly correct them.  Understand that I have crossed languages being translated and number of speakers for every language. As there’s no accurate data on how many speakers languages have, neither an accurate world population number; this statistics may pose a high margin of error. I’ve tried to stick to data provided by Ethnologue. (**) When I’ve spoken about DE translation numbers, I have decided that a language to be considered succesfully localised had to had both kde-base at 100% and a 70% of the interface translated in the case of KDE, and surpass the 80% of the interface translation for the case of GNOME. Both projects are huge so this are fair boundaries and similar in nature for both. Have in mind that the long living Windows XP is translated to about 60 languages but many of them are reported to be translated partiatlly, though over the 80%, so only considering languages at 100% would be clearly and unfair comparison.

Filed under: Desktop Environments, KDE, Linux, i18n, l10n   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Linux, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, i18n, l10n, Free Sofware, Open Source, Closed Source