Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 10:19 am Post subject: Re: OOo 3.2
yoxi wrote:
Now released - interesting that they seem to have semi-moved towards language packs these days, but there's no en_GB available for 3.2 yet.
I started working on building the Go-oo 3.1.1.1 that is based on OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 and I noticed that the number of languages in the code has exploded to over 100.
Since we can barely handle building the 58 language packs in OpenOffice.org 3.0.1, I have selected the list of language packs that we will build for NeoOffice 3.1.1 to all of languages in Apple's "tier 0, 1, and 2" list for Snow Leopard.
That list contains the following language codes. I hope that covers the various languages used by our donors. Please let me know if I have dropped an obviously common language:
ar
bg
cs
da
de
el
en-GB
en-US
en-ZA
es
fi
fr
he
hi-IN
hu
it
ja
ko
nb
nl
pl
pt
pt-BR
ru
sk
sv
ta-IN
te-IN
th
tr
ur-IN
vi
zh-CN
zh-TW
Patrick
Edited by pluby: Updated list of languages using the new language selection method described in this post.
Edited by narf to correct url syntax
Last edited by pluby on Thu Feb 11, 2010 8:11 pm; edited 1 time in total
I don't suppose you have download statistics from the language packs (or neooffice.org server logs showing clicks on given langpack "mirrors.php" links), do you?
If there are a significant number of downloads, I might add Hindi to that list, but that's really a thought based on "huge numbers of speakers" and "it might be useful to have a South Asian language available" rather than an idea if there are lots of Hindi-speaking NeoOffice users.
Also, I think from time to time in the past we've had posts here on the forum from Farsi (Persian) speaking users (in addition to Arabic speakers, who are covered), so it might be worth considering that one, too.
Beyond that, it looks like your list contains 31 languages, which is roughly half of the current list—hopefully the most-used half.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
If there are a significant number of downloads, I might add Hindi to that list, but that's really a thought based on "huge numbers of speakers" and "it might be useful to have a South Asian language available" rather than an idea if there are lots of Hindi-speaking NeoOffice users.
Also, I think from time to time in the past we've had posts here on the forum from Farsi (Persian) speaking users (in addition to Arabic speakers, who are covered), so it might be worth considering that one, too.
The real question is which of the missing languages have a large Mac OS X user base. Do speakers of Hindi, Bengali, Gujurati, or other of the missing languages have a reasonably high (maybe 5%) desktop market share? And more importantly, do enough of those Mac users live in a country transact online business with a credit card or PayPal?
The last question very easily eliminates a lot of countries as since PayPal is essentially a VISA and MasterCard merchant processing service, they tend to not support countries that do not have an established credit card industry. With a few exceptions, most of the supported countries are in North America, Europe, Japan, and a few of the smaller East Asian countries like Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
I am pretty comfortable adding back Farsi (Persian) as I think there is a fairly large number of Farsi speakers in U.S. and Canada and Macs have a high market share in both those countries so Farsi is a low risk language to add back.
As for Hindi, I am not sure if Hindi or some other South Asian languages are the best choice. I may be wrong but I don't think Macs really have much market share within India or Pakistan but there are a large number of speakers of one or more languages of those two countries in countries with high Mac market share. The question is what are one, two, three most common languages that those people speak?
Joined: Jun 11, 2006 Posts: 481 Location: Great Britain
Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 4:14 pm Post subject:
Personally, I don't see Hindi as a compelling choice. The Mac market in India is non-existent IMHO, and I don't imagine the addition of a Hindi language pack will be a driver of NeoOffice adoption.
I found what I think is a much better (and far less subjective) method for determining which languages to have language packs for in NeoOffice 3.1.1. By including only languages that meet the following two criteria, the number of language packs is only 34. I have updated the list in my previous post in this forum topic to reflect the new list:
1. The language has over 15,000 translated help entries (a fully translated language should have nearly 50,000.
2. The language is either listed as a Mac OS X 10.6 tier 0, 1, or 2 language per Mac OS X 10.6 or this Wikipedia article says that there are at least 50 million worldwide speakers of the language.
Using this new method, a few Indic languages, Urdu, and Vietnamese made the list. Farsi, however, did not make the list as almost no help entries. The same is true for Romanian and Ukrainian. Excluding the languages with few or no help entries seems reasonable to me as if the built-in help documentation is not translated, it usually indicates that the rest of the translations are not complete.
Edit: Patrick posted the above post while I was writing this reply to his post before that.
pluby wrote:
As for Hindi, I am not sure if Hindi or some other South Asian languages are the best choice. I may be wrong but I don't think Macs really have much market share within India or Pakistan but there are a large number of speakers of one or more languages of those two countries in countries with high Mac market share. The question is what are one, two, three most common languages that those people speak?
Right, Macs in South Asia are going to be small numbers, but there are lots of South Asians in the US, Canada, the UK, and so forth. I remember that we do have/had some NeoOffice users who spoke Hindi (and maybe another South Asian language), since one of them contributed some Hindi text to the multilingual Writer document we have for "press" purposes.
Hindi and English are the official languages of India; English is the official language of Pakistan and Urdu is the national language. In terms of the number of speakers, Bengali comes after Hindi and Urdu (and also happens to be the official language of Bangladesh).
Again, it's hard for me to say whether these are useful enough to actual NeoOffice users, but it did seem like, in terms of number of speakers, world geographical regions, and tendency to have significant populations in other countries that have high Mac usage, there was a hole for South Asia.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Last edited by sardisson on Thu Feb 11, 2010 9:03 pm; edited 1 time in total
1. The language has over 15,000 translated help entries (a fully translated language should have nearly 50,000.
2. The language is either listed as a Mac OS X 10.6 tier 0, 1, or 2 language per Mac OS X 10.6 or this Wikipedia article says that there are at least 50 million worldwide speakers of the language.
[...]
Excluding the languages with few or no help entries seems reasonable to me as if the built-in help documentation is not translated, it usually indicates that the rest of the translations are not complete.
You posted this while I was writing my previous post, but I agree, this seems like a good metric.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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