Localizing into Galician, our experience

Miguel Branco

A little bit of history

By 1999,'GPUL-traduccin' (part of the Grupo de Programadores e Usuarios de Linux at UDC) started to translate free open source software (GNU/Linux, DE...). At the same time 'Gzlinux' (partly associated to GLUG) was born, but instead rather focused on translating documentation (HOWTOs, FAQs...) At the end of that year, they 'merge' into an open Galician language translation project First called 'LeGal (Linux En Galego)', on march 2000 they decided to be named 'proxecto Trasno'

'Ao principio, e a falta dun nome mellor, empregabamo-lo nome LeGal (Linux En Galego) para referrmonos ao grupo, pero en maio do 2000 decidimos que o nome proposto por Francisco X. Vazquez Grandal, Trasno, era mellor. Tamn seguimo-lo antigo costume de buscar un nome e logo adaptarlle un significado, pero non atopamos ningn, ou mis ben atopamos de mis, polo que algns preferimos empregalo coma unha simple palabra, e outros prefiren dicir que significa cousas coma "TRAductores Solitarios do NOroeste", segundo a proposta orixinal, ou mesmo "TRAductores Sen NOme" ;-) '

Jacobo Tarro Barreiro & Jess Bravo lvarez - 2001

Free philosophy assumed from the start-up of the project

'In addition, computer science is such an important field that it cannot be ignored and, again, be another area where Galician [language] is not introduced. At the end of the day, most computers users are young people and supposedly those who will speak Galician in the future... if everything goes well :) '
Jacobo Tarro Barreiro & Jess Bravo lvarez 2001

Achievements after these 13th years

Focused on GNU, Linux distributions and Desktop Environments from the start Engaged in the most relevant Galician language translation projects

Translation Project SuSe/openSUSE, Mandrake/Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, MiniNO... Desktop environments: GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Xfce... OpenOffice/LibreOffice, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, Inkscape, GIMP, Scribus,...

Galician language spell-checkers: Ispell, Hunspell

Bugs and contributions to the development of Translate Toolkit, Pology and CAT tools (Lokalize, Virtaal, Gtranslator...) Development of

Tiboxe, a terminology query tool Trobador, an online translation memory web service Glsima, terminology discussion system Terminator, web server management terminology

'As trasnadas'

Meet ups to train new translators Debate and fix new computer science terminology into our language. After five events, nearly 500 new terms were agree on and defined. Those decisions are actually being applied at the main localization projects.

Trasnada '10, Ordes

'Proxecto Trasno' supported by a non-profit NGO

After some previous meetings and discussions, we founded a cultural association (a non-profit NGO) at 2009 What trigger us set up a NGO was to be the legal representation of the open community Being an active translator is required to be associated to the NGO

AC Proxecto Trasno foundation event - 17/10/2009

Why are we focused exclusively on libre open-source software?

Number of languages translated into

140

120

100

80

60

40

20

0 Gnome GNOME 3.4 KDE KDE 4.8 Win7 OS X 10.6

Risk
Language risk of extintion based on SIL and UNESCO reports

Constructed

Seriously Endangered Gnome Team KDE Team GNOME 3.4 KDE 4,8 Win7 OS X 10.6

Endangered

Potentially Endangered

Not Endangered

Ancient

20

40

60

80

100

120

Libre open source software philosophy

first, helps on preservation of endangered languages and second, facilitates enterprises to enter into new markets