I was wondering if you had a file of example translations I could look at?
I'm not sure how well I did on these, but here is an example:
ordono :: a command
krio :: an alert
komento :: a log

colindean:Hey all,

I've been doing English -> Esperanto translation in open source software for nearly a decade. It's been a great way to help me learn the language and its vocabulary, given my seemingly isolated location until recent times.

Today, for the first time ever, a developer of a fast-growing encrypted chat program rejected my translation, saying this:

We actually already had an Esperanto translation, but ended up removing it a few weeks ago because it was not worth maintaining since Esperanto is spoken by such a small amount of people. I'm sorry, but I won't re-add it.

This was the first time this has happened and I was kinda taken aback by it. After I got over my initial "why you no accept pull request?" anger, I began to think how best I could lobby for the restoration of the localization. I'm specifically not linking to the publicly-available feature request so as not to cause a herd of pitchfork bearing Esperantists to manifest and go...merdbrulado.

It's 55 strings right now, and I don't see it getting much larger. I'm really unsure what effort goes into maintaining a language in their minds, as they're using Transifex to manage i18n/l10n and I'm more than willing to keep the translation updated.

Looking through the other languages, the only one that doesn't have in the millions of speakers is Basque (Euskara). According to Wikipedia, it has approximately 715k native speakers. Next is Tibetan, with approximately 1.2M speakers. Esperanto has tiny native speaker base, but may have 160k-300k second-language speakers. This is insufficient for me to show that Esperanto has more speakers than another language included.

They've kinda prioritized translations into languages that represent regions of the world where the incumbent government is...not as excited about freedom of communication as other governments are. Esperanto doesn't really fall into that, as it tends to attract an academic and exploratory community instead of an oppressed or subversive one!

What other arguments could one make for including Esperanto in open source software, or more specifically, secure chat software?

Thank you for translating software into Esperanto! That's great! All games I write in the future will include EO localization; I don't write a lot of software but if I make some tools I'll do that, too.

I think that, it wouldn't be too much work to maintain an EO localization of a software program so long as the project has a dedicated Esperantist. Otherwise, it could be a pain to re-find another person to help translate when new versions come out.

I'm curious to know what you've translated thus far,colindean! Dankon

fenris_kcf:First: I think your thread doesn't belong in the English forum…

Pri la temo: Mi ankaux ofte tradukas programarojn kaj ret-pagxarojn al Esperanto kaj gxis nun neniam okazis al mi, ke la responsuloj diris, ke ili ne volas la tradukon al Esperanto. Sed mi certas, ke ankaux ekzistas uloj, kiel tiuj, kiujn vi menciis. Estas fakto, ke granda parto de homaro taksas Esperanton kiel strangan lingvon, kiujn nur mond-fremdaj idiotoj scipovas. Supozeble malfacilas konvinki tiujn ulojn, ke ili malpravas. Sed verdire mi pensas, ke la "resisto", pri kiu vi parolis, pligrandas en mallibera programaro. Provu nomi 3 grandajn malliberajn programarojn, kiuj havas Esperantan tradukon!

PS: If the moderators insist, i'll translate my message to English. But i hope that someone can move the thread to Vidpunktoj.

Threads cannot be moved in the current forum software. Please translate the message or it will be deleted.

It's not really cool to intentionally post a message in the wrong language. Even with the new forum software, we will move whole threads to a new forum, but not individual messages that are in the wrong language. Those are likely to be marked as being in the wrong language and hidden until they are translated.

If it's really that big a deal to you, then post your message in English to the English forum and include a link to the "twinned" message in the Esperanto forum. People frequently post a similar message in two different forums if they want responses in two different communities.

That's funny.... I always thought open source software developers were more open (forgive the pun) to including Esperanto localizations in their software than proprietary ones. Just out of the software I frequently use, LibreOffice, Anki, OpenTTD, and Firefox have EO localizations. I hear that one can use Linux in EO as well.

I'm going to play devil's advocate here.

I can in fact somewhat understand why people might feel it is relatively pointless to make Esperanto translations of application software. There is no person in the world whose only spoken language is Esperanto. If a piece of software is already translated into many human languages, speakers of those languages will not need to use it in Esperanto. There are probably very few potential users for whom Esperanto, out of a list of >20 languages, is the only possible or even most comfortable choice of language.

Other than e.g. on Wikipedia, there is also no opportunity here to promote Esperanto by making it more useful, since the strings in a program will necessarily say the same thing in every language.

Things are of course different with software running on web servers such as forum or blog software - they will need to be in Esperanto if its content is intended to be in Esperanto. This is why I contributed to the translation of the Simple Machines Forum software. But there are really better ways to promote Esperanto than to translate application software to it - such as to contribute to Esperanto Wikipedia.

And whether it is good to reject it if somebody has already done it, I am also not sure. But remember that every translation needs to be maintained and kept up-to-date.

darkweasel:I'm going to play devil's advocate here.

I can in fact somewhat understand why people might feel it is relatively pointless to make Esperanto translations of application software. There is no person in the world whose only spoken language is Esperanto. If a piece of software is already translated into many human languages, speakers of those languages will not need to use it in Esperanto. There are probably very few potential users for whom Esperanto, out of a list of >20 languages, is the only possible or even most comfortable choice of language.

That's true for any language of the size of Esperanto. I am not using Esperanto translations of application software. But they are installed on my computers. When I have Espernato speaking guests I would let them use my computer on a guest account which is configured to Esperanto. Same when I borrow my laptop to someone on an Esperanto event.

johmue:
That's true for any language of the size of Esperanto.

Not entirely. Other languages with a similar size have native speakers who speak no other language, or at least not as well as that small language. Esperanto doesn't have either, all its native speakers also speak another language from childhood.

johmue:
I am not using Esperanto translations of application software. But they are installed on my computers. When I have Espernato speaking guests I would let them use my computer on a guest account which is configured to Esperanto. Same when I borrow my laptop to someone on an Esperanto event.

Ok, these are admittedly use cases where it may be useful. You are right, I must admit I didn't think of such use cases.

darkweasel:
But there are really better ways to promote Esperanto than to translate application software to it - such as to contribute to Esperanto Wikipedia.

I don't think that's true. This might seem a bit cyclic, but if I learn a language, I want to use it. I didn't download the Eo Firefox because I couldn't understand the En version, I downloaded it so I could have a small dose of Eo every day. Also, I don't see how contributing to the Eo Wikipedia is any more useful than Eo software, since as you pointed out, there are no monolingual Esperantparolantoj.

johmue: When I have Espernato speaking guests I would let them use my computer on a guest account which is configured to Esperanto. Same when I borrow my laptop to someone on an Esperanto event.

Excellent point. I've personally had to ask for help to do relatively simple computer tasks when confronted with a foreign-language operating system, or else I've had situations where I've been ok only because I am so familiar with Windows that I can feel my way through it blindly in a foreign language
(and language note - you lend your laptop to someone, and that person borrows it from you. I don't normally like to correct people's English but your English is good and I figured you might appreciate the feedback)

Whoa, this thread certainly has grown since I posted it! It's gone all over the place, from criticizing my choice to post in English, to lamenting that Esperantists don't actually use software in Esperanto enough to merit the translation work, and beyond.

Two arguments in favor of supporting Esperanto that I've extracted from the the thread thus far:

• Additional language available when a friend uses the computer
  
• Help Esperanto learners via immersion in everyday tools

One argument against:

• No one speaks only Esperanto, so it's likely that another language they speak is supported

Can any of you think of some more?

Side note:

I chose to post in English because most of the software I find needing translation is written in English. My audience for this post is English-speaking translators of software. Moreover, I chose English because I could write my message across significantly faster in English, a welcome thing given the amount of time I had available to write the post. I do not use my Esperanto terribly often these days aside from translations because I am one of two people I know in person who know anything more than "saluton", so I find myself using the vortaro a little more often than I would like and it slows me down