A few months ago, we decided to make the various character strings in AllPeers easily available on Babelzilla (The official localization site for Firefox extensions) so that people who wanted to have AllPeers in their language could simply translate the software.
At the time of the announcement we were amazed that within 48 hours, 8 languages were already in the making. Today we’re delighted to announce that the next version of AllPeers is currently being translated into 28 languages thanks to the dedication of an amazing team of volunteers.
We already have 15 languages ready so if you are a native speaker of any of the following languages, please do not hesitate to go to Babelzilla and give a hand to the existing translator(s) of:
Catalan
Traditional Chinese
Esperanto
Estonian
Galician
Japanese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovenian
Swedish
Turkish
Italian
When you develop software, it is often hard to know what people really think of your work. Of course, you can setup a blog, a support forum, a feedback form but most of the time these are used by people who are encountering problems. So to experience first hand that there are users out there who care enough about your work to spend some of their spare time to make your software more accessible to their compatriots is an amazing feeling.
So to all of you, if you are reading: Thank you, we love you too!
Software companies based in the United States have traditionally had an advantage over the rest of the world, otherwise so many of the top names wouldn’t be American. No European or Asian company has come even close to attaining the dizzying heights of an Amazon, eBay, Yahoo or Google. Nonetheless, this situation is slowly changing and an occasional theme of this blog has been the rise of Europe as a software power.
One of the biggest advantages that European companies have over their counterparts across the pond is a better, more intuitive understanding of multiculturalism. Nowhere does this manifest itself more clearly than in language. The vast majority of Americans speak only English competently (if that), whereas most Europeans with any kind of education can get by in at least two, with many people speaking three, four or more languages proficiently. This gives you the kinds of deep insights into other cultures that are essential when delivering a product to an international audience.
AllPeers (the company) is no exception: among our 14 employees we have seven nationalities, with four working languages in our Prague office. So it’s almost ironic that the software has been available until now in English only. I’m pleased to announce that with v0.55 we’ve rectified this problem, with the help of a fantastic group of volunteers on Mozilla add-on translation site BabelZilla. The new version is available for download in the usual place. Besides support for Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Slovak, Spanish, there are a number of other improvements (particularly some new additions to the chat functionality) that you can read about on the download page.
I am probably not taking a risk by saying that the US will continue to be a hotbed of innovation for the foreseeable future, nor can I be very wrong if I say that South East Asian will produce more innovation than it does today. I may raise a few eyebrows, however, by saying that I believe “Eastern Europe” will produce some of the big technology hits of the next decade.
My firm has been looking at companies in “Eastern Europe” for a couple of years and it strikes me how many terrific ideas and great people we have come across. While the number of companies being created is still not important, it is the desire to try to create that strikes me – entrepreneurship by any other name.
I frankly thought it would take much longer for us to see entrepreneurship point it nose in the east. After all, 50 years of communism does take some getting over. The page has, however, turned. Allpeers and Quintura, an investment my firm is about to make, are both good illustrations of the region’s potential to innovate.
Look hard enough and you could find that diamond in the rough.
An amusing post by Clay Shirky about one futile and vaguely ludicrous effort to categorize all flavors of human relationships using a handful of English-language terms. The effort even has a snappy name: XFN or XHTML Friends Network. (Note to self: blog a biting entry about the dangers of escalating acronymization. Are there any acronyms left that aren’t composed of other acronyms?)
What struck me most about this was the fact that XFN’s creators felt it necessary to find “gender-neutral” terms for all of their relationships. This had the most impact on the “Romantic” categories, not coincidentally the ones that Clay chose to pick on. The archetypical example was the choice of “date” for someone you’re dating, instead of the more natural “girlfriend” and “boyfriend”.
Someone ought to let these folks know that English is not the only language out there, and the effort to find gender-neutral words in other languages makes even less sense. In Czech, practically every term that refers to a woman uses the suffix ka. So a female doctor, teacher and police officer would translate, respectively, as doktorka, učitelka and policistka.
I encounter similar issues all the time in the course of developing AllPeers. Although we currently have only an English version, it is clear that we will want to internationalize it at some point. So I shudder when I’m forced out of expediency to write code like:
// Generate the name of the shared folder for this resource
strName = "Shared " + poResource->GetDescription()->GetName() + "s";
For non-programmers, this code says that the name of the shared folder for some type of resource should be the word “Shared”, followed by a space, followed by the name of the resource (say “Photo”), followed by an “s” (resulting in “Shared Photos”). Well, obviously this won’t work reliably even in English (consider what happens if the resource is called “Child” or “Goose”). In most languages, the problem is even worse since different types of nouns tend to form plurals in different ways (German is notorious for this) and adjectives often vary based on noun gender. So in French, a folder for shared photographs would be photos partagées, but the equivalent for books would be livres partagés, without the extra e at the end (since photo is feminine and livre is masculine).
My point is that it’s naive to imagine that we will find gender-neutral terms for human relationships in English, and even more naive to think that this will fly in any other language. Better to accept this and use more natural terms that may vary based on gender, since all of the machinery to handle this is necessary anyway in well-designed, internationalized software. The good news is that it’s a darn sight easier to generate natural language than to understand it.
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