The Irish language has often been compared with Welsh. While Welsh is still a threatened language it’s in way better shape than Irish, for quite many reasons, too many to go into tonight. One thing I noticed during my tiny involvement with the Irish localization of Firefox was just how active the Welsh folk are with software localizations. On Firefox those lads were way ahead of the ‘Irish team’ and had the browser translated yonks before the first Irish builds ever came out.
One ongoing localization I have some interest in now is Open Office. OO, for those that don’t know, is much like MS Office, only better (imo), is open source and therefore free. Now here’s a comparison: a team at the University of Wales is getting GB£320,000 over 26 months [old news, Sept '04] to localize Open Office … while the Irish localization is being carried out by basically one guy [with some very recent support], a volunteer, who so far, has translated about 15,000 of the 20,000 or so strings.
I don’t know how ‘organised’ the Welsh really are or if there is any ‘coordination’ for all the translation projects but certainly they are very very active particularly in the open source scene. In the case of Irish it looks as if teams just fall together and translate some piece of software, there’s certainly no coordination to it. What I would really like to see for Irish is a comprehensive modern on-line dictionary [current dictionaries don't cut it IMO] and a full database of terms which translators can use for reference. There should also be some sort of central location where ongoing projects can be registered and perhaps could apply for financial or other support. Software in Irish is needed, the are a lot of departments in colleges and even in the government who have started using Firefox in Irish and who will, I have heard, use Open Office when it is finished so there is some demand. It’s about time we had proper organisation in place to get more good software translated into Irish. Maybe Foras na Gaeilge should be taking care of this ??
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