Communicator Now Available In 23 LanguagesSunday June 27th, 1999Arielb writes, "Netscape [is now] available in 23 languages (US English, UK English, French, German, Japanese, Danish, Chinese - Simplified, Chinese - Traditional, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Polish, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Turkish and Slovenian)." Check out the press release. I think this number will be going up drastically after Mozilla is released. I know that Thai and Catalan localization projects are currently ongoing. If you have info on others, please let us know in Talkback. How about fixing nasty bugs instead of porting to any language in the world? I propose to start with the new addressbook in 4.5x and 4.6x. It´s nearly unusable especially in the Unix versions (e.g. Solaris). The OS/2 port is being done by third-party coders, not Netscape developers. i don't know how the 4.x codebase is set up, but if it was done even halfway properly, one needs not "port" an application to a new language. the process is known as "localization", and one merely translates the text strings and puts them in the proper place; maybe there's a need for recompilation, sometimes not even that. in any event, for any application that's already been translated even remotely well, doing it again is more a matter for translators than programmers. it should not steal much time from fixing bugs. No unicode support, as a result no Hebrew, Arabic or other BiDi languages and Thai effort is a separate and tough effort. If communicator/mozilla would support unicode properly the problem would be non-existant. Right now, it is almost impossible to use Netscape to see sites in hebrew :( Well in M7 I can select a Hebrew char set but on many webpages the Hebrew is backwards. Of course when I designed my website with Hebrew, I made sure that it wasn't backwards Irish would be nice. Unfortunately, I am not a native speaker, nor do I have the resources. But if someone wants to jump in.... hey I betcha someone will do esperanto too I have in mind certain languages that I might want to code out but I have no clue what kind of encoding scheme I want to use for hindi and kannada. Really, this shouldn't be that exciting. Previous versions of Communicator (for Unix, anyway) had a `Netscape.ad' file, which you could edit at will to put Communicator into any language/dialect/slang you liked. The only thing this new `functionality' [barf] does is to make it easier for LOTE (Language Other Than English) users to get to localized versions of Netscape or Netscape-sponsoring Web sites: Netcenter, My Netscape, or sites which pay Netscape for Internet Keywords. None of which I use anyway, and I would think I represent the great majority in that regard. Oh well. Cé la vie. Kia kaha. -- mpt P.S.: All those who thought that that `Mozilla Services' proposal a few items ago was a good idea, *please* go back and read my rebuttal of it before you start coding/advocating it. Thanks. |