[Reader-list] software-language

[Tripta]

This is an interesting article raising issues and interactions with computer
technologies and other discourses and practices. Microsoft has shown no or 
little interest in pursuing localization for Icelandic. and the case of using 
free software to do the same is pursued. 

The localization project within free software and it's utilities has really 
taken a boast in the last few 
years.(http://www.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp_status.html). 
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp_status.html


The various many localizations projects attempt to involve, evoke and arouse 
participation within the technological realm of other discourses within the 
immediate context. And these within the free software domain intend to instil 
different sensibilites and approaches towards technology, information, right 
to information and the freedom(s) associated with it. 

It would be interesting to look at the experiences of these interactions and 
the understandings evolved from it. How has the relationship with technology 
changed? and how has this easy access to technology, after the language 
barrier being removed, enabled the participants to look at things 
differently? what are the sensibilities that have evolved of technology?  
what are the further developments undertaken by the participants, if any? how 
has the relationship changed in regards to the non-localized applications and 
software? 

do these localizations projects encourage participation in the larger free 
software development team (hurd/linux kernel)? 

it would be really great if discussions on the same could continue. 

cheers
tripta_________________________________________________________________
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-01-21-007-05-OP


 Linux and Ethnodiversity 
Jan 21, 1999, 00 :08 UTC (13 Talkback[s]) (1499 reads)

by Martin Vermeer 

(Professor Vermeer argues eloquently and conclusively that putting software 
localization into the hands of a company like Microsoft would be very 
limiting and a detriment to human culture. -- Editor) 


Linus Torvalds is one of the six per cent or so of Finns who have Swedish as 
their mother tongue. One is tempted to ask if this is a coincidence; I want 
to argue that it is not. 

Throughout world history, contributions to the things that make our society 
worth being called civilization -- literature, science, art, music, social 
innovation -- seem to have come in a vastly disproportionate measure from 
people who were not at home in one national culture only, but in several, or 
that belonged to another culture than the mainstream one in their country. 
Think only of the contribution the Jews made to European art, science, 
architecture, and social innovation; or the influence of the African slaves 
and their descendants on North American -- and thus Western -- musical 
culture. An alien entity tuning in only to Earth's music radio stations could 
easily conclude that the dominant continent on this planet is Africa! 

There is ample real life proof for this, and considering multi-ethnicity a 
problem rather than a great opportunity is such a sad shortsightedness. 
(Consider this next time you go out eating Thai :-) 

Also, Finland is a case in point; ask people in the street what famous Finns 
they know and see what comes up. Sibelius, of course, and Mannerheim;Kekkonen 
will be mentioned and the runner Paavo Nurmi; and, of course, Torvalds.Few 
will mention the Nobel prize winning writer Sillanpää, and even fewer the 
chemist Gadolin; he lived before Finland had attained statehood. But did you 
notice that half of the "famous Finns" have Swedish family names? Not bad for 
a 6% minority...! 

Numbers don't mean that much. 

It is important to understand that a nation is more than a piece of real 
estate. Sure, the real estate is needed to anchor a nation's existence -- but 
nationhood is about language, culture, and way of life. And the language is 
the gateway into a nation's culture and way of life. Heck, it is even a 
gateway into a way of thinking! 

Knowing only one language -- English, let's say -- tends to impose certain 
patterns on one's ways of thinking. Knowing one more language inevitably 
widens one's perspective, especially if the language does not belong to the 
same family. I know from experience: When I moved from The Netherlands up 
North to Sunny Suomi, I was confronted with the need to learn this weird, 
alien, Finno-Ugrian tongue. Ah well, at least the alphabet was Latin, and the 
spelling phonetic and utterly predictable. I learned to read Finnish texts 
aloud so that my listeners understood them even if I didn't. 

Hard work it was, but well worth it. Finnish is so entirely different from 
Western languages -- no articles, for instance, and no real propositions -- 
the fourteen-odd cases fullfill that function -- and almost everythingis done 
with prefixes and suffixes: possession, negation, diminution, etcetera.And 
the "verb of negation": I not, you not, he/she not, ... weird! And the 
partitive case playing the role of the "partitive article" in French (and in 
fact in English, where it is represented by a missing article). 

Compared to learning Finnish, Swedish was easy, being so close to Dutch. 
Regularly reading the daily paper "Hufvudstadsbladet" was enough. But not as 
useful for shaping the brain as Finnish was. It's a bit like learning 
programming languages: after knowing Pascal, other procedural languages hold 
few secrets; but Lisp is a different cup of tea. 

Finnish is not a small language; world wide, it belongs to the 200 largest 
amongst a total of 5000 currently existing languages. Small languages -- 
those threatened with extinction -- count on average 6000 speakers. It is 
expected that 2000 such small languages will become extinct during the coming 
century. Such extinction represents an irretrievable loss of part of the 
common heritage of mankind, a loss not unlike that of a biological species. 

Extinction is forever. 

Finnish, and Finnish-Swedish, the variety of Swedish spoken in Finland, are 
established national languages with a firm legal status, so one would think 
that they are not under threat. Well, think again. According to an article 
appearing last summer 
(http://www.seattletimes.com/news/technology/html98/icel_063098.html) 
Microsoft is not prepared to translate, or localize, Windows into the 
Icelandic language. Too small a market. And all icelanders know English 
anyway. They are not prepared to let the icelanders do it, either; no way 
they are going to let some banana republic play with their precious source 
code! 

What makes this all the more painful is that Iceland is an exceptionally 
literate nation and Icelandic an established national language enjoying 
massive official support. If this can happen to Icelandic, how can one expect 
any support for even smaller languages such as Faerisk (the Faeroe islands' 
language), Saame (the Laplanders' language) and Greenlandic/Inuit? There 
exists a common term bank project of the Nordic countries, nordterm; one 
wonders why a corresponding initiative for software localization has not been 
talked about more, also in the European context; fear of technical 
complexity? 

It must be clear from this that no small nation can afford to be dependent on 
a large commercial software company for the preservation of its national 
heritage. Heck, Microsoft's turnover is bigger than Iceland's GNP! Literacy 
today means also computer or IT literacy and becomes an impossibilityif not 
even the operating system that runs all computers is available inlocalized 
form. 

The Icelandic minister of culture has tried, apparently without success, to 
turn Microsoft's corporate head, threatening to investigate "alternatives" in 
case they don't listen. Apropos, the KDE graphic desktop environment for 
Linux, has been partially "Icelandized" (www.kde.org/i18n.html). Perhaps 
Iceland should investigate this alternative anyway, even if Microsoft would 
chance to reluctantly give in to the pressure. It's way better to be master 
of one's own fate. Open source offers an easy and attractive way to localize 
all software, not least due to the foresight and lack of cultural prejudice 
of the Free Software Foundation providing such an excellent tool as gettext. 
Having myselfbeen involved in localization efforts for the LyX document 
processor, I believe this alternative to be a fully realistic one. 

Computer sovereignty? 

Talking about diversity in the context of free software, it's not just about 
ethnodiversity. The notion of diversity as freedom lives and prospers in 
Linux. Let a hundred desktops blossom! People are different, so whyshouldn't 
software be. Besides, freedom works. Funny to think ofLinux and freedom as 
manifest destiny, as illustrated by the emerging binary compatibility 
standard for Unix -- something the big vendors with their expensive consortia 
never achieved. Now, for the first time in history, it's being done, courtesy 
of a "bunch of hackers", thank you very much. Freedom works for hatching 
world-class software, but just as well forevolving mature, workable 
standards. 

If you're content to just have the trains run on time, you won't even achieve 
as much as that. Freedom is no luxury. And freedom breeds diversity, which is 
not a sign of weakness -- quite the opposite. That's just the same error that 
all dictators make, to mistake the rough-and-tumble of democratic discourse 
for a display of weakness. 

In conclusion, I want to quote the Finnish, ethnic Swedish computer 
linguistics professor Fred Karlsson, who was interviewed in Hufvudstadsbladet 
on the occasion of his election as "professor of the year" (and yes, you can 
finger him :-):
"We have in fact started to use certain concepts analogous to those in biology 
-- we talk of linguistic habitats, diversity and so on. The small, indigenous 
peoples' languages are perfectly adapted to their needs, local environment, 
way of life. Reflecting upon the value of diversity, we should also realize 
that a language is a crystallization of many hundreds of generations of labor 
and of understanding the world around us. It is like asking whether the work 
and world view of our ancestors have any value. Of course, they have."
Martin Vermeer is a research professor and department head at the Finnish 
Geodetic Institute, as well as "docent" (probably something like assistant 
prof.?) at Helsinki University, Department of Geophysics. He uses Linux both 
at work and at home.