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Weekly Status Report, W25/2007

I spent lots of time this weekend at the Donauinselfest, one of the biggest yearly open air festivals with reportedly 2.6 million visitors spread over three days this year (my pics from the event are already online).

Leading up to that, I managed to do a share of SeaMonkey work as well in week 25/2007 (June 18 - 24):

Items where nothing happend but which I hope to to get some traction on again:

The list of things I've done might look rather short (and I wonder myself about this), but it shows again what amount of time some single tasks like a mere sync of two existing "code bases" (or actually "string bases" in this case) can suck up. And I think the improved quality we'll be able to provide all German users (and probably users of all languages through the en-US bugs spun off this) is really worth that time.

Entry written by KaiRo and posted on June 25th, 2007 16:26 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | 2 comments | TrackBack

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AuthorEntry

Keith

from the US

quote
This is interesting stuff. Thanks for keeping us posted. I'm looking forward to SeaMonkey 2.0.

I was reading the bugs about the German localization, and a couple things strike me. One is that it seems odd that an Austrian and a German are trying to collaborate on a German translation. Now, my knowledge of German is very low (I love how it sounds and have studied it, but my talent for languages is way too low to learn it), but it seems like it would be equivalent of getting an American and a Canadian to agree on the words to use in an English version (AFAIK, the German translation is de-AT, Austrian German, nicht war?).

It's also interesting that you mention in one of the threads that German doesn't have a word for website. That's probably a good thing. In Esperanto, there are words for website and web browser, but the problems occur when non-technical people talk about them, because they seem to not know the difference between the web and the Internet. So, "web sites" are commonly named "Internet sites," which is OK (if imprecise), but a less OK situation occurs when the said non-technical people use the word for "Internet suite" when talking about standalone browsers. The technically savvy try to educate, but there are just too many people who don't understand or are unwilling to. And I'd imagine, you'd have the same problem in German if there became standard German terms for those concepts.

Another thing is the form controls. One thing that I'm seeing that I don't think is actually a problem but I don't like is that the modern theme is using native controls instead of the old modern widgets. I liked the modern widgets better, to be honest. In fact, I think the modern theme is so cool. I don't think I'd want to theme my entire desktop in it, because that would be too monotonous, having all applications look the same. But I love it when I'm using the suite.

Oh well, I think that concludes my rambling. Thanks for keeping us suite lovers updated with this blog. I, for one, appreciate it.
2007-06-26 11:19

KaiRo

Webmaster

quote
For the form controls, I think this is completely done by code that is not theme-aware, so not much we can do about it, unfortunately.

For Austria/Germany: There is no real difference in the official language between the two countries, there are some words here and there that are not commonly used by the other or regionally used words, but esp. for computer UIs, there was never a language difference between versions for Austria and Germany, and the language is practically identical for both.
If you go to day-to-day language (esp. food, etc.) the differences get bigger, but we rearely need things like cream topics in browser UI :P
Really big differences would be in casual language or dialects, but not in the officially standardized language ("Hochdeutsch", which sometimes is said to be "the first foreign language" that Austrians learn ;-) - as most of us speak dialects with sometimes rather large differences to official German).
2007-06-26 14:52

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