On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, derek holzer wrote:
Here you have the old chicken/egg syndrome. If the GUI says "Nachricht", but the docs say "Message", you have a big problem for a new user, and I would argue that is a bigger problem than if the GUI says "Message", the docs say "Message", but the user happens to be German.
This is assuming that the software would only display German _or_ English and not both.
The danger I see is that non-English-speaking users will (of course) be attracted by reading that PD "supports" French, German, Portuguese, whatever. And the initial experience with the GUI will support that, but any further attempts to figure out what is really going on will only frustrate them
In practical terms, my suggestion would be to would leave localized GUI support in the dev catagory, and not mention it anyplace else until matching documentation is supported.
Do you mean: you want to give them an already finished product so that they can't get to know that they can participate in the translation even though they might be an ideal workforce for doing so?
Publicity of Pd should not be done like marketing of commercial off-the-shelf products because the development model of community-based free/libre/open-source projects such as Pd is based on work-in-progress and the removal of (most of) the barrier between the users and the developers.
If some users don't want to have anything to do for the community then they deserve to pay big bucks so that they can rent a permission to use a competing piece of software on a limited number of computers.
People who come to the community demanding a certain level of quality without even offering to contribute anything, not even money, don't even deserve to be part of the community. They may use the free software as much as they wish according to clauses of the BSD and/or the GPL, but they don't have to bug us about it. I want to avoid being polluted by the kind of people who think that free software developers are an inferior species of critters that deserve to be exploited.
Because of all of that, I don't think that we have to either support a
language as in provide everything in that language or not do it at all.
If someone is really pissed because N % of the doc isn't yet translated in
French or Farsi or Faroëse then the only compensation i'll send them is a
reality chèque signed by Santa Claus himself.
I want people to know that Pd is not a finished/polished product and most importantly that they can do something about it!! Else I'd rather start a business building a better Pd with a MAX-style business model and sell the software back to you at 242,55 Euro plus tax, but it would be a lot easier to just disappear from the arts scene completely and go work as a full-time actuarial mathematician in an insurance company.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada