On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Mikko Huhtala wrote:
> and the keyboard in another. For instance, I have a Finnish keyboard,
> but prefer the installation to talk English to me, since most of the

Choose English as your system language and then press the checkbox
in the same screen. From there you can pick up Finnish and continue
with the installation. If I remember it right the next screen should
ask you which keyboard do you have.

> time the Finnish version reads like it was translated from English to
> Finnish via Serbo-Croatian and Suahili by Frechmen, who have learned
> foreign languages by reading some dictionaries while sitting in a

Err.. Quite a harsh comparision, but as the translator of DrakX I have 
to agree. The translations by themselves are not _so_ bad, but because 
there are a lot of untranslated strings and because they have just been 
written in the editor string by string as fast as possible without ever 
actually testing them or reading them again.. Ok, you got the point. 
Even I haven't been using the Finnish translations, because of they
were not ready for the daily usage.

What comes to translating this kind of projects it takes really long
time for one or two people to translate even the Mandrake's own 
applications. By this far I have used over 100 hours of my time just
to make rough translations for the few applications which come from
MandrakeSoft only. Correcting the translations takes about the same
time, so if I don't get any help, the next version won't probably
have usable translations either. 

> after the install you run the risk of being faced with a
> non-English KDE and other horrors (not that I use KDE).

By your statements I suppose that you would use English anyway,
were the translations perfect Finnish or not. I would also, because
the official Finnish computer terminology sounds odd when you first
hear it. But then, someone has to test the translations..

Regards,
  Matias Griese, 
  Finnish translation team


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