En/na ericzen ha escrit:
Here in Catalonia Microsoft had lots of pressure from the Goverment to translate Windows and Office into Catalan, as its mention in the article.More reasons to use GNOME! http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/31/2256213&mode=nested&tid=109Thank you and Happy New Year's to our translator, Karl, and our applier, Pierre! Je suis l'morse, Eric Zen (I wonder what Nynorsk would be for that line)
Nothing from our friends at Microsoft comes for free. The Catalan goverment has sign a very large contract with Microsoft to do all the e-goverment stuff using Microsoft software. We are talking about hundred of millions of euros.
As a part of the deal, Microsoft will create translated versions of Office and Windows products into Catalan.
Now the funny part. Microsoft has a technology called LIP (Language Interface Pack). This is basically a group of resource-only DLL that installed over Windows or Office 11 allow a translation of the product. They already have done for Windows XP in Catalan (see http://www.softcatala.org/prog129.htm).
The bad news is that the translations are partial, you cannot localise the on-line documentation, and it not a full-installable version. It's just a patch will resource only DLL. Better than nothing, but languages like French or German have full installable versions.
Basically, the Microsoft strategy for minor languages is a patch tecnology, and they will provide these tools to local goverments. In LongHorn, they said that they will have a XML based l18n system, like Abiword does for years now.
--
Jordi Mas
http://www.softcatala.org
