On 09/07/2014 Seth Flaxman wrote:
I'm hoping you'll humor an outsider working on a natural language machine learning question. If there's a more appropriate place to send my question, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know.
For generic questions the dev list is best, but l10n is OK too in this case. Make sure you follow this conversation in the archives if you are not subscribed: http://openoffice.apache.org/mailing-lists.html
I've been using pairs of sentences from OpenOffice manuals in different languages (see here: http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/OpenOffice.php and here for a sample: http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/OpenOffice/de-en_sample.html) and I'm wondering, were the OpenOffice manuals all originally written in English, and then translated to other languages?
Interesting stuff. So, "OpenOffice manuals" is a very generic term. If I see it correctly from your 35 MBytes file, you focused on what we call the "online help" ("online" has another meaning now, so this can make things confusing!). The history of that part of OpenOffice goes back to the Nineties, so I don't know the exact process. But at the origins it was surely written by German native speakers. I don't know if they wrote it in German and translated it into English or if they wrote it in English (the latter seems more likely, considering how the translation process works).
Or might some of the manuals have been originally written in German (from the StarOffice days?), and then translated into English?
As I wrote, it's more likely that we had an English version written by German native speakers. But it's very, very old stuff.
And what is the process now--is English the source language for translations?
It is. If a new string is added to either code or online help, it is added in English. Often by a non-native speaker, even though we may ask a native speaker to take a look.
Then it is copied to Pootle where it is translated into other languages. Example: https://translate.apache.org/it/aoo40help/
Thanks in advance for your time and a great piece of software, which I use daily!
You are welcome! If you have any more questions, or ideas for interesting projects, or time to help, just let us know!
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