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1. Juni 2007
talking moon
In a discussion about automatic translation we just had in #seamonkey, I got reminded once again of the good old "talking moon" story, which is always good for a laugh.
We all know that automatic translation services don't work perfectly, but e.g. translate.google.com does a good job in many cases and you can figure out what the original text was talking about, even if you don't understand the language it was written in.
Back in 2002, mozillaZine had a story about a German magazine polling their readers about their favorite browser. Of course, the magazine wrote its original story in their language, which was German, so mozillaZine linked to the rough translation of that Google service.
The mostly English-speaking Mozilla community was quite glad about this, and people could easily figure out through this translation what the results of that poll were. But, reading one sentence there made some people wonder what it means: "The Browser from talking moon is further unquestioned on place one, ...". Now how is a talking moon related to browsers? Looking into the original article revealed what had happended: "Zwar liegt der Browser aus Redmond weiterhin unangefochten auf Platz eins, ..." - "Redmond" had been translated to "talking moon"! Well, "red-" as a prefix derived from the verb "reden" - "to talk", can surely be translated to "talking", and "Mond" is the "moon", that's also correct. Just the algorithm detecting "Redmond" as a German word was probably a bit wrong, I guess
Who would have thought that there's a talking moon right in the vicinity of Seattle?
We all know that automatic translation services don't work perfectly, but e.g. translate.google.com does a good job in many cases and you can figure out what the original text was talking about, even if you don't understand the language it was written in.
Back in 2002, mozillaZine had a story about a German magazine polling their readers about their favorite browser. Of course, the magazine wrote its original story in their language, which was German, so mozillaZine linked to the rough translation of that Google service.
The mostly English-speaking Mozilla community was quite glad about this, and people could easily figure out through this translation what the results of that poll were. But, reading one sentence there made some people wonder what it means: "The Browser from talking moon is further unquestioned on place one, ...". Now how is a talking moon related to browsers? Looking into the original article revealed what had happended: "Zwar liegt der Browser aus Redmond weiterhin unangefochten auf Platz eins, ..." - "Redmond" had been translated to "talking moon"! Well, "red-" as a prefix derived from the verb "reden" - "to talk", can surely be translated to "talking", and "Mond" is the "moon", that's also correct. Just the algorithm detecting "Redmond" as a German word was probably a bit wrong, I guess
Who would have thought that there's a talking moon right in the vicinity of Seattle?
Von KaiRo, um 14:16 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla | 2 Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
>380k Downloads for SeaMonkey 1.1.1
Yes, you read this right in the topic: SeaMonkey 1.1.1 has more than 380k officially recorded downloads!
To be exact, the "bouncer" download redirecting tool recorded 381,196 downloads for SeaMonkey 1.1.1 from its release on February 28 until the release of 1.1.2 yesterday - for the three main download links on our websites only, i.e. Windows installer, Linux installer and MacOS X Disk Image, in English language.
Downloads of any other builds (.zip or tarballs, other platforms and other languages) are not counted, as well as downloads that are issued directly from FTP servers, or through other means of distribution (Linux distro packages, etc.) - so the real number is probably significantly higher, but we don't know such numbers. What we know are bouncer statistics (links to download.mozilla.org go through this tool), and only those.
A graph of bouncer downloads for all releases since 1.0 nicely shows how numbers are rising:
Of course, the long period between 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 has helped a lot to reach such heights, but still this shows that a significant group of people is interested in the SeaMonkey suite.
I hope numbers continue to increase like that in the future - and thanks for every one of those people who downloaded our software and hopefully are also using it!
To be exact, the "bouncer" download redirecting tool recorded 381,196 downloads for SeaMonkey 1.1.1 from its release on February 28 until the release of 1.1.2 yesterday - for the three main download links on our websites only, i.e. Windows installer, Linux installer and MacOS X Disk Image, in English language.
Downloads of any other builds (.zip or tarballs, other platforms and other languages) are not counted, as well as downloads that are issued directly from FTP servers, or through other means of distribution (Linux distro packages, etc.) - so the real number is probably significantly higher, but we don't know such numbers. What we know are bouncer statistics (links to download.mozilla.org go through this tool), and only those.
A graph of bouncer downloads for all releases since 1.0 nicely shows how numbers are rising:
Of course, the long period between 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 has helped a lot to reach such heights, but still this shows that a significant group of people is interested in the SeaMonkey suite.
I hope numbers continue to increase like that in the future - and thanks for every one of those people who downloaded our software and hopefully are also using it!
Von KaiRo, um 00:26 | Tags: Mozilla, SeaMonkey, stats | 1 Kommentar | TrackBack: 0
