I'm now writing an how-to on that, and plan to soon provide a shell script to automatize integration, i.e. replace in a Slackware tree genuine packages and scripts by internationalized versions.

This is to contribute to feasibility studies of integrating the internationalized installer into Slackware, and also not to feel ashamed of staying idle, while other members of slint team are working hard, translating and reviewing

Here are the news of the day.

Our home pages in German and Polish have been updated.

slint-20130719 and associated md5 file are available.

This release is in sync with Slackware-current as of Tue Jul 16 21:18:56 UTC 2013

Settings for locale uk_UA are included in SeTlocales, as well as adapted fonts, so that members of the Ukrainian team can begin testing their translation "live".

Toolbox slint-20130719/scripts/slint2.sh now includes an "Utilization" menu entry that explains how-to do "live" test of translations of slint.sh, thanks sycamorex for noticing that was missing. A note about that has been added to TRANSLATORS.

ISO and USB installers for slackware-current and slackware64-current have been rebuilt accordingly (end users will just notice kernel upgrade).

Slackware's installer is now being translated in Bulgarian, thanks and welcome on board tuxbg.

Reminder: you can follow us on Transifex.

i think, in general, nor installer, nor slackware itself, not need any translation to any languages - english is more than international - sufficient.
i can say that as a native lettish, and having my second-language russian. english in IT and OS is very ok - much better than many translations who i see, when terms is translated so strange, so you cannot understand it completely...
that's my opinion about subject. i always use english interface on my computers and phones, as so as on TV, DVD and another devices.

I'd say something similar happened to me. I learned English long before software came translated in my native language, Spanish. I remember seeing the first translated programs and thinking them weird, unusual wording for concepts learned in another language, they looked so strange in my own language that I just simply didn't want to use them.

Nowadays Spanish translations are much better than those I saw many years ago, and usually I don't mind an interface in Spanish or English as long as it makes sense. But old habits die hard, after 30 years using computers I still prefer English interfaces in my systems. So yes, I know exactly what you mean.

Of course not, Slackware doesn't need it. But realize that you and I both have advantages that many people in this world don't have: we can read and understand more than one language, and we are computer literate. Believe it or not, we are a minority.

My opinion is that there are plenty of capable people who would benefit from software in their own language, people who have the skills to use it, but can't use it because they only speak and read in their native language. I know a few people like that, and I'm sure you do too.

So, perhaps Slackware doesn't need it. But I firmly believe it's the people, the potential future users of Slackware who will need it.

3 members found this post helpful.

latvuian translations is inferrior - mostly because there non use an international words like as computer, internet, and so on, but all try to use newly-born words in "latvian". as result - no one understand, what it is, and what they do. for example, google webmaster some weeks ago switched to latvian output, and i see a strange graph "reptile programm" - in exact translation, in latvian. completely not understand, what that means. switching back to english interface, and see - it is a "web crawler" :-O

about "My opinion is that there are plenty of capable people who would benefit from software in their own language, people who have the skills to use it, but can't use it because they only speak and read in their native language. I know a few people like that, and I'm sure you do too." - i dont think so. i encounter situation, whem many peoples think -if it changes language, it understand all. never.
if you switch term names to simpler - it help nothing to understand things, who you no understand.
if in quantum physics we take a simpler terms, it doesnt help to understand it all housewife with easy.
also if any not know how to work with GIMP. for exapmle, it do not know to - regardless with interface language. also, if you translate diesel engine parts names to local language -no one understand diesel engine working principes or diagnostics only for language change reason.
also in learning programm or thing - not important, what the parts is naming - you learn a "edit" or "rediget" can you give access to that or that tool...
there is even problems with various languages and naming - if user with latvian interface asks me what, for example, clean a firefox cache, and i tell his way based on my english version - edit - preferences - so - it have a big chance, he can do nothing. all names, menu it see a different words, it has have none "edit" and none "preferences" at all. that is undoubtedly evil from interfaces localization, as i see it.

So in your opinion a translation in latvian of Slackware's installer wouldn't be useful. Anyway someone who would volunteer to do one would be very welcome - including yourself, of course.
As Diantre and probably our three dozens of translators and reviewers do, I personally know some people for whom not being able to understand Slackware's installer messages simply prevents them to use it. So instead they use a localized Linux distribution, or Microsoft Windows. But we would like that they be able to use Slackware, as we think it's a good Linux distribution.

By the way I assume that Microsoft localizes its software in order to increase its revenues and profits. So probably they think that doing so more people will use their products, thus that there is a need for localized software.
Whilst I agree that being able to efficiently use a specialized software requires a good knowledge of underlying concepts, I don't think that this prevents translation of associated vocabulary, provided that it be done by people knowledgeable on that field, of course.

Anyhow slint is only about translating an installer and package management or administration tools, so that's not an actual problem here. Nevertheless we do require that our translators have a sufficient technical knowledge and that all translations be fully reviewed.
I hope that people using a localized software will find help from people speaking the same language. I guess that's already the case for other localized software.

I slint's case, when the 'dialog' program is being used to display a menu, only texts associated to tags are translated, not the tags themselves, so that shouldn't be a problem anyway.

All this being said I know that I won't change your opinion, but am quietly confident that its expression won't discourage any of slint's contributors, and take this opportunity to thank them all again.

I understand. What do you think about "spider program" instead? Because that's the actual literal translation in Spanish for "web crawler". Even in English, if you ask someone without the specialized computer knowledge about a "web crawler", the first thing that comes to mind is a spider, not a computer program that automatically indexes internet pages. I can only understand why the translator chose "reptile", since some reptiles do actually crawl. Perhaps not the best of translations, but an honest attempt, and actually that's what counts.

You see, the problem you're having with these translations is the same problem that all traslators experience sooner or later when translating technical/computer terminology: neologisms. Since the common language in the technological/computer world is English, and new terminology appears at an alarmingly fast pace, what can we do, as translators, to communicate those concepts in our native languages?

Either we introduce a neologism (your "reptile program"), or we use an anglicism, the word or phrase untranslated. For example, in Latin America, we use "script", "kernel", "DVD", "laptop" and other English words without any problems. When these words first appeared in the language, many people resisted their use, they're simply foreign words. But after some time passes they enter the mainstream use and are "adopted" into the language. The same happens with neologisms, only time will tell if a neologism is accepted and used in a language, despite your personal feelings about such a word.


Well, I have to agree with you here. If someone doesn't have the knowledge of a particular field, then that's just like hitting a wall. And if this particular field is in another language, then that's not one, but two walls.

But read my post carefully, I wrote "people who have the skills to use it". I meant that there are people with the necessary technical knowledge to break one of these walls, and our work as translators is meant to break the other wall, allowing some people to use something they were not able to use before. I think I didn't imply that translating software gives you instant knowledge about the software, which certainly isn't true, as you point out.

Well yes, I've been there, I've also done something like that, and even got the t-shirt. In the front the t-shirt says: "Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more; si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi", and in the back it says: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do".

Long time ago, in 1995 to be exact, I started working as a tech support representative for a major computer manufacturer, taking calls from customers in North America. My next job (with a different company) was exactly the same, but giving tech support to local customers, in Spanish. Oh, the nightmare! Everything was the same but everything was different. My customers they all used Spanish interfaces in their software. I knew the software by heart, but I had to learn it all again in my native language, and I didn't have a good opinion of those first translations nor the new terminology I started seeing back then. I had no choice but accept it and move on.

Normally, program and command names are not translated, but menus and program messages are. And that is not inherently evil, that's actually necessary so users of the software, who only speak their native language, understand the messages and options the software provides.

WiseDraco, please don't take this post the wrong way. With all due respect, I think your complaint is not against slint nor the futility of our translation efforts, it seems to me that the problem you're having is with bad translations from English to Latvian and the very normal resistance to neologisms in one's language. It happens to all of us.

I'll second Didier's suggestion here and say, why don't you help us? If you have the knowledge (I know you do), why not make a difference and start translating in your language? You may be the one who'll introduce better computer terminology in your country, used for years to come. Who knows?

If the translator is inventing a new word or term, I think it's a good idea to also write the original term. Like this:

"bla bla reptile programm (web crawler) bla bla"

Sorry for immodesty of quoting myself, but that's done.

Out of laziness I just wrote the script slintify.sh and heavily commented it, instead of providing a separate how-to.

It provides an internationalized mirror of Slackware (current only) 32 or 64 bits, and optionally a DVD ISO image of it.

Maybe wishful thinking again, but I consider this as a new milestone on our way to get Slackware internationalized. But remember that we are not there yet (see WARNING at the root of internationalized mirror that slintify.sh produces).

To use it, just download the new slint tarball , check its integrity with its associated md5 file, unpack it and run the script that you will find at the root of unpacked file tree.

@ my fellows translators and reviewers: you can use it to complete review of your translations, see TESTING at the root of internationalized mirror.

This file lists internationalized Slackware tools that can now be used inside an installed Slackware, among which: pkgtool, {explode,install,make,remove,upgrade}pkg, liloconfig, netconfig and xwmconfig.

Of course testing is not reserved to slint contributors: on the contrary, the more the better.

To attract more testers (not all Slackers are reading this thread) maybe I should begin a specific thread?

slintify.sh put aside, slint-20130729 doesn't contain any change that deserve to make the headlines, see the Changelog for details.

I didn't upload new ISO and USB installers this time, as there wouldn't have been any change as of Fri Jul 26 03:25:08 UTC 2013 according to the Changelogs for Slackware-current.

Next on my TODO list is: write a "how to maintain an internationalized Slackware".

I'm curious as to why the English version of slint's installer differs from the original Slackware installer.

If you read the text on this screenshot, you'll see that it's different.
or
And here's another screenshot. On this one, you can see that the window size isn't the same (and text differs too).

Why is that, Didier Spaier?

Thanks for your questions, elesmod, and sorry for other readers but they deserve a _long_ answer.

In the genuine installer, the default keyboard map is "us", but in the internationalized one each locale has its own default keyboard map, set by this script, so I had to include reference to the "kbd" variable in the text you see. For instance:replacesI also modified the title accordingly.

For a similar reason the text you see on your second screen shot is slightly different.

You can check that yourself if you wish, comparing genuine and internationalized versions of script rc.S.

Now let's talk about windows sizes.

In the genuine installer, windows sizes are tightly adjusted to displayed text, which is very good from an aesthetic point of view.

Unfortunately, as you know length of a translated text vary upon language used and is often significantly longer than the English one, so keeping the same sizes in the internationalized installer would have required the user to resort to vertical and/or horizontal scrolling to display the entire translated messages. On the other hand I can't reasonably demand that translated messages fit in a fixed length box.

So I favored usability over aesthetic and decided to generally enhance boxes' sizes. Often I chose to enlarge boxes, as IMO vertical scrolling is more widely accepted than horizontal one (as you can see on most web pages' layout). I also tried to use the same width for most boxes, to get some visual consistency.

FWIW this article on http://docs.slackware.com includes some practical recommendations for developers, maintainers and translators of shell scripts, including how to deal with this issue.

Ideally, I would have set boxes' width and let the 'dialog' program compute their proper height depending on the length of text to display, which varies upon languages. Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to get that using dialog's program options and refrained to request such a feature from Thomas E. Dickey, dialog's author (as a side note this certainly wouldn't be a simple task, as we display UTF-8 encoded text and glyphs' width vary upon font used).

Still, it is in my TODO list to better adjust boxes sizes to displayed text. Before doing that I wanted to have a bigger sample of messages translated in different languages.

I didn't find a satisfying way of displaying exactly the same messages (same content and same boxes' sizes) as in the genuine installer for US English. It is of course possible to maintain two initrd.img files (one genuine and one internationalized) and allow user to choose which one to use through adapted stanzas in isolinux.cfg and elilo.conf, but I'm not convinced that this would be worthwhile, as in the future we would have to maintain two concurrent versions (as a side note, this could be done for 14.1 though, as a transitional measure if our BDFL is not yet ready to fully replace the genuine installer by the internationalized one :-)

Any comments, remarks and suggestions on these issues are welcome.

Oh, and on the right side of your first screen shot I see:This is obviously a bug, that will be fixed in next slint release, so thanks for drawing that to my attention too

1 members found this post helpful.

Wow, thank you for such a thorough explanation.

I didn't notice the line with the font... but you're welcome

This:is because I forgot that this font is included in genuine installer for Slackware-current only (and not for Slackware64-14.0 that you tried). This doesn't hurt in fact as this font is not needed in that case, so maybe I'll just redirect the error message to /dev/null. Nobody will notice
EDIT. No, we won't hide anything under the carpet. Just copy the font to slint/data/fonts is cleaner and safer.

Hi, and thanks for slint project, the opportunity to participate in the project. Currently, I get a error 408 when I try to access to slint's page. Does anyone have the problems with accessing to this page?