Resources for i18n published | Drobe.co.uk archives

Resources for i18n published

By Chris Williams. Published: 9th Jul 2004, 22:21:50 | Permalink | Printable

Translating RISC OS for the world

Detlef Thielsch, of German RISC OS dealer a4com, has urged more users to help in the effort to internationalise RISC OS by providing translations for foreign users.

RISC OS provides support for other languages by grouping operating system resources (such as interactive help messages, error messages, window designs and sprite icons), into 'territories'. This means a new territory can be written to provide desktop resources for, say, users in Spain without requiring the OS to be re-written or edited by the OS developers. Detlef has therefore produced a set of 'skeleton territories' to encourage translators to lend a hand in the translation of RISC OS.

"What we are trying by providing skeleton territories for some languages (currently Italy, Spain, Esperanto, Netherlands; ask for others), is to encourage native speaking people of a certain territory to translate the RISC OS user interface to their language," explains Detlef.

"Clearly this means it should be a user of the operating system with some experience in using RISC OS. Programming skills are not required but a basic knowlegde might help. We will be happy in assisting people doing the real translation."

Detlef has also provided translations for various large RISC OS software packages, including RISC OS itself along with Andreas Feldner. He also recently wrote an article with Andreas for Archive magazine on internationalising RISC OS, which is available for download from here.

Although RISC OS is known for its UK heritage, it has enjoyed numerous contributions and essential assistance from an international community of users. As we're particularly proud to hear from readers in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australasia and back again, we hope Detlef's efforts leave no users behind - especially in wake of recent developments from Select, RISC OS 5 and, hopefully soon, Castle's Merlin.

Links

Skeleton territories - zip file download Internationalising RISC OS

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Discussion

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Good work, Detlef! Perhaps Castle can be convinced to include these things in RISC OS 5.

hzn on 10/7/04 5:56AM
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Internationalising RISC OS is about the best news and possibly more important than resolving the messy CTL and ROL dispute. Displaying many of the desktop icons and utilities in many choices of languages is a start to opening the doors to non-english users (and that sounds like a huge market potential). Is the "Encoding" as used on PC internet included in this "Translating RISC OS for the World?". It sounds great Detlef have asked for help, some languages are not so easy to translate the exact same English meanings. My wife is a professional Thai teacher and when we teach numerous Thai students English language, the translation gets trick at times. In just the past 2 years we have homestay hosted, a couple of Japanese teachers (of English) and 12 Chinese, 3 Thai and 2 Cambodian students studying English language in New Zealand.... what a pitfall for all my RISC OS machines, not one of my computers could do anything outside of English to help them! I'm pleased that Detlef and the German community users can see the importance of a Global RISC OS product. Well done! Regards, Steve.

Sawadee on 11/7/04 9:22AM
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I don't know if unicode or any, as you put it, encodings used on the internet, are allowable in OS resources, which would restrict the use of far-eatern multi-byte character sets, despite the availability of the unicode font manager (and, I'd assume, translation tables) in RISC OS 5.

Still, even if this is not possible there are a lot of languages which can be served by the existing provision for i18n, and Detlef's templates. All we need is a few bilingual users with a little time they can give.

ninja on 12/7/04 7:33PM
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