MozillaZine

Communicator Now Available In 23 Languages

Sunday June 27th, 1999

Arielb 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.

#1 Re:Communicator Now Available In 23 Languages

by Anon

Sunday June 27th, 1999 9:08 AM

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).

#2 Re:Communicator Now Available In 23 Languages

by mozineAdmin

Sunday June 27th, 1999 9:11 AM

The OS/2 port is being done by third-party coders, not Netscape developers.

#3 Re: "porting" to a language

by Anon

Sunday June 27th, 1999 9:27 AM

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.

#4 Re:Communicator Now Available In 23 Languages

by Anon

Sunday June 27th, 1999 10:35 AM

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 :(

#5 Re:Communicator Now Available In 23 Languages

by arielb

Sunday June 27th, 1999 12:57 PM

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

#6 Re:Communicator Now Available In 23 Languages

by briank

Monday June 28th, 1999 3:02 AM

Irish would be nice. Unfortunately, I am not a native speaker, nor do I have the resources. But if someone wants to jump in....

#7 Re:Communicator Now Available In 23 Languages

by arielb

Monday June 28th, 1999 3:42 AM

hey I betcha someone will do esperanto too

#8 Re:Communicator Now Available In 23 Languages

by Anon

Monday June 28th, 1999 9:10 AM

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.

#9 Cool, or trivial?

by Anon

Monday June 28th, 1999 3:41 PM

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.