New Projects
@Fulup: What do you mean with private software? Software originally programmed in your language? If it so, so it is typical for all small languages. I don't know software originally programmed in the Sorbian languages, either. I also translated software outside of translatewiki, e.g. Seamonkey, Firefox and Thunderbird into Upper Sorbian and Seamonkey and Thunderbird into Esperanto.
A big problem are missing technical terms. For Sorbian languages now the online project www.serbterm.de is existing to collect and create technical terms for Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian. It is a private initiative who plans work to gether with linguists but I think it would take a long time before there would be specific results. from this cooperation
Is there a place, where we can converse about missing technical and special terms, and how to treat them? I'm very interested from a linguist standpoint, both to learn about other languages ways to solve these problems and sharing ideas and paths towards finding good treatments.
I would not mind using the support page for this as well, unless we are getting on some users nerves with it, though I think an extra talk page would likely turn into a nice targetted archive over time.
Yes, I agree, I think too that it would be useful to everybody to have a special space on that wiki to discuss technical terms. When I translate, I always give a look to other translations in other languages I know (mainly roman languages) but quite often I find it useless as roman languages uses very often the same term which comes from latin roots. And that does not help me much for my language. Sometimes I use Welsh as well because it's related to my language but Welsh is spoken in an English speaking environment so they usually adapt or translate English terms or concepts to their language which are like a copy carbon of the English concept. That solution doesn't work with Breton because we don't live in an English environment, we live in a French speaking environment.
An extra page is better because the Support page should be for the current translation work only. I don't know how we could call the new page, maybe Translating:Technical terms or under Support page Support/Technical terms.
How about setting up a page Translating:Translators' forum, where discussions on translation issues including technical terms can happen and information is shared on its talk page. On the page itself we could put links to general resources of interest to more than one language, and general advice and tips.
Sorry, my English is not clear enough, I meant proprietary software not free software, like the ones provided by Microsoft. If you don't have access to those softwares in your language you need to look for an alternative, which is good because that way you can provide a service to your comunity that wouldn't exist otherwise but still it is not completely satisfactory as the vast majority of the people keeps using proprietary software. For the technical terms we build a terminological database since the late nineties which is free to use on the Breton language board website.
Thank God there is Open Source software enough. Yes, you are right, the issue is that proprietary software often is the most used one and you must convince people to use open source software instead. E.g. if somebody would translate Open Office into Upper Sorbian, it would be difficult nevertheless to convince Sorbian institutions to use a Sorbian Open Office instead of a German MS Office. Private people use open source software more often because it is free. Unfortunately, I often don't get any feedback for my translations and therefore I often don't know if my translations are used resp. how many people use them.