> Hi I want to enterprise the valencian version of OpenOffice.org > localization effort. The idea is that they will work at the begining > under the "es" version of the project but later they want to get their > own project under "va".
First of all, I want to say that I am very pleased to have a version of Ooo translated into Valencian, I have some friends who work or have worked in that project, and I am sure it's possible to do some great work together. Catalan and Valencian are almost universally recognized as two dialects of the same language by the international linguistic community. That's why, for example, Valencian doesn't have an ISO code by itself. Another good source of information for the languages of the world, the well known ethnologue website, uses the form "Catalan-Valencian-Balear" to refer to it, probably to avoid any conflict with the name of the language: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=cat In any case, the most used term to refer to the language it is just "Catalan". It's also well known that some people from Valencia, but not all the Valencians, feel that they language is different from the Catalan spoken in Catalonia and want Valencian to be recognized as a different language from Catalan. All this has become a political issue, with some political parties supporting the different alternatives. And when you put politics into your software, take for granted that some people will stop using it for political reasons. When you decide to create a Valencian Native Language Project, different from the Catalan Native Language Project, you are positioning OpenOffice.org in one of the political sides, recognizing the facto one of the two options. If some Valencians want that, they shouldn't use the Openoffice.org Community. The OpenOffice.org Community doesn't have the knowledge or the skills to decide on that affair. If Valencian is a different language, they have to ask the ISO organization and other international associations to approve that. For now, the international standards organizations recognize Valencian as the same language as Catalan and the OpenOffice.org community should follow those recommendations because, unfortunately, there's a political conflict in the middle of that. What I really don't understand is to try to integrate them inside the Spanish community instead of the Catalan one. I have no problem into changing the name of the community, if necessary, or even accept a co-leader from the Lliurex project. What I am sure that I don't want to happen is to have users and organizations in Catalonia dropping OpenOffice.org because other projects from the community decide on things that clearly affect other NLC projects without even consulting them. I think this particular case reflects the need of the creation of regional communities, as Louis proposed in this same OpenOffice.org Conference. Regional communities that are geographically very close to user and can fully understand the consequences of the decisions they take. Regards from China, -- Jesús Corrius http://www.corrius.org/bloc/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
