Re: Jive -> Kernel (International Linux)

Fabio Olive Leite (leitinho@akira.ucpel.tche.br)
Tue, 21 Jan 1997 22:31:02 -0200 (EDT)


Hi there!

> Many people have Linux running on a private home computer. They don't care
> about other users which don't exist.

But they still report bugs sometimes, and they'll have to translate back.
English is already everywhere in our homes, and we don't give a damn, so
what's the rush about having the thirty or so messages the kernel spits
out during boot or the few others during uptime in a local dialect? What
about ksymoops? Would we need ksymoops_de, ksymoops_br, and such?

> It's not about understanding. I can say that I understand English quite
> well. But why is there a project to translate man pages and Howtos to
> German?

Because reading a two hundred pages LDP book is far different than reading
twenty lines on a log that contains mostly hex numbers. ;)

> > - If you are that deep in trouble that you have to deal with a
> > serious *kernel* error message: If you want to ask somewhere
> > (here for example) you'll probably want to post the english
> > messages to be sure people understand them.
>
> Someone offered a solution to this. Only use numbers in the log files and
> display the appropiate translation with a special viewer program (got this
> right?)

Yeah, then we'll need a rescue disk and a log-struggling-disk :), because
the language databases will get bigger and bigger and won't help one bit.
Currently one can visualise logs with cat or more, or any other little
util that can simply read a file.

> So??? If I don't know the background, it's still nicer if it is in German.

Come on, a normal user wouldn't care about the difference of "IRQ
conflict" or "Conflito de IRQ" (That's in Portuguese). They just don't
know what's an IRQ anyway :).

> > - Have seen to much really bad translations: If you have to
> > translate it back to english -- word by word -- to understand
> > what it says...
>
> Well, I'm gonna make it really good :-).
> And everybody could submit patches.

Cool, maybe I'll (if this ever gets done:) find inspiration in Rio de
Janeiro for translating my kernel, and replace "Now booting..." with
"Passa a caipirinha" or "If only we could think instead of playing
soccer..." :).

[]
Fabio
( Fabio Olive Leite leitinho@akira.ucpel.tche.br )
( Computer Science Student http://akira.ucpel.tche.br/~leitinho )
( )
( Running Linux is like running an Amiga; )
( It gives you that "I don't buy Microsoft" feeling... )