Leonardo Fontenelle

I’d like to quickly mention this article on internationalization of people names:

People who create web forms, databases, or ontologies in English-speaking countries are often unaware how different people’s names can be in other countries. They build their forms or databases in a way that assumes too much on the part of foreign users.

I’m going to explore some of the potential issues in a series of blog posts.

So far there are only two articles, but reading is already interesting enough. The first article, for example, demonstrates how the “first name, last name” doesn’t work in many countries. Brazilian Orkut users know that well: the lack of a middle name features makes it hard to find people.

Then the author list a series of Wikipedia articles on the structure of people names in many cultures. Have I ever said Wikipedia always surprises me? The article on Portuguese names (written in English) is great, for example.

Eric Sink, ex-developer of what today is Internet Explorer, has today a company which makes software development tools. He always felt guilty for not internationalizing his software, but that might have changed after a conference in Spain:

Even though our product is English-only, we currently get between 30 and 40 percent of our revenue from outside the U.S. [...] We’ve experimented with localization and received abysmal results. We’ve been to a trade show where most people’s first language is not English, and nobody even complained.

He acknowledged this wouldn’t happen with end-user software. But, do developers really want software in English?

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The GNOME 2.22 translation starts in two days! The Brazilian GNOME translation team is in a great phase, keeping GNOME’s interface completely translated and increasing the documentation translation. Furthermore, we are always enhancing old translations and improving our translation process. Know who’s who in this team which in the next months is going give GNOME 2.22 a translation as good as the amazing novelties in the RoadMap.

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The same expression may be translated in many ways, depending on the context. GNOME already had its hack to specify context for original messages, but in the future GNOME will use GNU Gettext’s msgctxt. This way it will be much easier to understand the context in original messages, and we’ll be adopting the same syntax as (I believe) KDE 4.

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I used to leave the computer working constantly, mainly to contribute to project Folding@Home (Fórum PCs team). Some days ago, however, Augusto Campos reported a 30% reduction in the electricity bill simply by not leaving the computer turned on 24/7 anymore. I tried putting my computer to hibernate, but my video card’s proprietary driver was impairing X restoration. I replaced it with the free driver, and since then I’m much happier for many reasons.

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I’d like to encourage free software users to, when appropriate, get in touch with developers to ask for enhancements or report errors (”bugs”). Yes, sometimes it takes too long to get an answer. But today I’ll tell you two experiences I had, with a much better result than I expected initially.

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I believe this is the shortest description ever about the process of translating GNOME to Brazilian Portuguese. For more information, read our project page (in Portuguese) or drop by the #tradutores channel at FreeNode.net.

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As promised some weeks ago, I did some updates here. I improved the Aqueous Lite theme to support translation and some optional plugins. English readers won’t notice much difference, unless they click in the link for the Portuguese language. I also updated WordPress and the Gengo plugin to solve some broken links, but unfortunately the “next page” and “previous page” links are not working yet. When the issue is fixed, I’ll make the new theme version available.

I also made some changes in the social networks part. The side bar is now simpler, the only chicklets being Technorati and the Brazilian counterpart BlogBlogs. I still own the individual articles buttons to let people add them to sites like del.icio.us and digg.

Today I’m not going to write about anything.

Today is my wedding day!

Umberto Eco is best know as the writer of The Name of the Rose, but he also happens to be a respected semiotician and linguist and a prolific essayist. After writing about software translation dilemmas, I discovered Umberto Eco’s book on the translation process: Mouse or Rat? Translation as negotiation (in Italian: Dire quasi la stessa cosa: Esperienze di traduzione). This isn’t, in fact his first book on the subject. It’s the result of his experience as a translator, as a translated author, and as translation manager. He doesn’t try to write “a theory of translation”, but rather approaches a series of problems faced by translators. The book name comes from the concept that, in the translation process, one always looses something in exchange for something else. He says translation is about possible worlds. The translated work ought to produce the same effects (semantic, syntactic, stylistic, metrical, symbolic …) the original did, but to some extent all translations would be unfaithful to the original. Umberto Eco also discusses the intersemiotic translation, the adaptation of art works from a medium to another (paintings, movies, music etc.). That’s why, according to a review (in Portuguese), the book should interest not only writers, translators and researchers, but also anyone involved in theater, cinema, music etc. adaptation.