Saturday, August 01, 2009

Help translating KDE

KDE has a strong translators community being one of the most translated software all around but as all areas of [Free] Software development the more people helping the better, so you should consider going to http://l10n.kde.org/teams-list.php and contact the team of your language. In case the point your team is marked as inactive or the contact for your team does not answer, you should contact the general list for KDE i18n where we'll give you further guidance.

"Why should i translate if i already understand english?" will you ask yourself. There is no definitive answer to that but i can give you two reasons:

  • As any contribution to Free Software will make your karma go up and you'll be part of something BIG

  • It will help you improve your english and your native language knowledge. That's because most of the times you understand english enough to understand the sentence, but transforming it to correct native language in a semantic and sintatic way is not always simple so you end up improving a lot both your English and your native language skills



As i said all languages need help, but the ones of this list are more in need as their former translators don't seem active anymore: Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Breton, Chinese Hong Kong, Croatian, Dzongkha, Esperanto, Faroese, Igbo, Indonesian, Kabyle, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirghiz, Kiswahili, Lao, Latin, Luxembourgish, Malagasy, Maltese, Maori, Mongolian, Nepali, Occitan, Pashto, Persian, Swati, Tamashek, Tatarish, Tibetan, Tigrinya, Urdu, Uzbek Venda, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another reason why you should consider translating KDE into your language: Doing so, you'll help other members of your community who doesn't understand english as well as you.

Jonno said...

On a more selfish note, another reason to help translate software is that then you only have to translate it once, ratehr than every time you use it...