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?

Unue: Mi pensas, ke via fadeno ne apartenu al la Angla forumo…

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.

[en]
First: I think your thread doesn't belong in the English forum…

Regarding the topic: I also often translate software and websites to Esperanto and until now it never happened to me, that the responsibles said, that they don't want the translation to Esperanto. But i'm sure that there also people out there, like the one you mentioned. It's a fact, that a many people see Esperanto as a strange language only spoken by unworldly idiots. I guess it's hard to convince these people, that they are wrong. But honestly i think that the "resistance" that you were talking about, is more common in proprietary software. Try to same 3 bigger proprietary softwares, which have a Esperanto-translation!

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

Mi apogas. Estus bone, se diskutoj tiaj, do netemantaj pri E-lingvo mem por angloligvaj lernantoj, okazu prefere en la E-lingvaj forumoj.

I second this. It would be good, if discussions like that, so those not being about the Esperanto language itself for english speaking learners, were in the Esperanto speaking forums.

Saluton!

It is sad though that this happened again and again. With the inclusion of Internet, who can count the number of speakers of Esperanto ? Besides, it is also inaccurate to say Malay speakers in Malaysia is 27 million by the national population. The actual fact, in Malaysia or other parts of ASEAN, many natives are still using their native languages, for example, the Cebuan, which include in the Google translator and placed top 20 in the wilkipedia is from the Philippines. Therefore to say Tagalog is spoken in the nation, is might be just a portion of it, just as Malay in Malaysia.

The problem lies with the Esperantists, many esperantists do not use the Esperanto version of the products if there are their native tongue there.

The search page of Google which has Esperanto and if they want to track the record of the users of that service, I am sure it would be little.

Therefore, it has to blame the Esperantists instead of the company.

johmue:

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

Mi apogas. Estus bone, se diskutoj tiaj, do netemantaj pri E-lingvo mem por angloligvaj lernantoj, okazu prefere en la E-lingvaj forumoj.

I second this. It would be good, if discussions like that, so those not being about the Esperanto language itself for English speaking learners, were in the Esperanto speaking forums.

Umm, forgive me, but this forum is for topics discussed in English. So why wouldn't a topic, written in English, about Esperanto be in the English forum? What am I missing?

Also, as someone who is far from fluent in Esperanto but also a programmer and avid supporter of OSS, I would have totally missed this post if it were to be put in the Esperanto forum. On the other hand, the majority of your reply presents a bit of a problem in the English forum.

brian

brianpribis:

johmue:

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

Mi apogas. Estus bone, se diskutoj tiaj, do netemantaj pri E-lingvo mem por angloligvaj lernantoj, okazu prefere en la E-lingvaj forumoj.

I second this. It would be good, if discussions like that, so those not being about the Esperanto language itself for English speaking learners, were in the Esperanto speaking forums.

Umm, forgive me, but this forum is for topics discussed in English. So why wouldn't a topic, written in English, about Esperanto be in the English forum? What am I missing?

Also, as someone who is far from fluent in Esperanto but also a programmer and avid supporter of OSS, I would have totally missed this post if it were to be put in the Esperanto forum. On the other hand, the majority of your reply presents a bit of a problem in the English forum.

brian

Sorry, I meant this reply to be for the post above this one, but I guess it works for both johmue and Fenris_kcf. b--

colindean:
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.

I guess it is ultimately up to the developer, but it does seem silly that he wouldn't include it even though someone is willing to do it. It really won't cost anything. Unfortunately I think a lot of people look at Esperanto sort of the same way they look at Klingon: Interesting and geeky but not really relevant. Esperantists would do well to not only switch their language settings to Esperanto but to take a few seconds and let the developers know they appreciate the effort.

brian

Of course it's up to the everyone his- or herself to decide whether to place a thread in an Esperanto-subforum or a natural-language-subforum, but others might be interested in this topic too — not only the people, who speak English. The information, that the author of this thread translates software to Esperanto since 10 years, implies that he has an Esperanto-level high enough to formulate the thread in Esperanto, which is the language that lernu is about. Wouldn't it be sort of unkind if i started a topic, which you are interested in, in a language you don't speak so you wouldn't be able to take part in the discussion while the obvious solution is to use Esperanto — the language we are here for?

EDIT: Since you don't seem to know: There's a discussion about this subject in Vidpunktoj.

I think that this attitude has nothing to do with number of speakers. Those people would be happy to include Mangareva language translation.

brianpribis:Umm, forgive me, but this forum is for topics discussed in English. So why wouldn't a topic, written in English, about Esperanto be in the English forum? What am I missing?

It's a topic concerning all Esperanto speakers not only the English speaking ones.

Also, as someone who is far from fluent in Esperanto but also a programmer and avid supporter of OSS, I would have totally missed this post if it were to be put in the Esperanto forum.

So what about the Esperanto speakers, whose English is far from fluent? Are they less important than English speakers, whose Esperanto is far from fluent? Keep in mind that the topic is covering relations of Esperanto and OSS, so its concerning Esperanto speakers in the first place.

IMO the Esperanto community should discuss their stuff in Esperanto so that all Esperanto speakers can participate.