On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 10:05 +0100, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi,
When you say "there are technical barriers", what technical barriers?
We have for instance been working hard on getting a better
localisation framework. BetaWiki is clearly superior. It now shows
pointers to what a message is used for. It allows for the use of
"gettext" files. I am really happy to see that for several languages
from the Indian subcontinent this has been taken up. Consequently the
use of Commons has been improved because the user interface of these
languages is improving. I have noticed Bengali, Gujarati among, I have
failed to notice Hindi for instance.
What other technical barriers are there that we can help with? I have
read in mailing lists that not enough complaints are received from
Asia and consequently developers are not aware about issues. In one
instance there was an issue with performance and once this was
noticed, the performance in Asia is said to have increased
substantially as a result.
Thanks,
GerardM
Gerard,
The technical barriers for users are with respect to input
(keying-in) in respective languages and reading them on their computers.
There are several old standards in place to which people are accustomed
to. Since we use Unicode on Wikis, it takes time for people to get
accustomed to the new encoding (for them), new setup in terms of
software they use on their machines.
There are rendering issues on Operating Systems, issues with default
fonts provided on Operating Systems. The problems are far beyond
localisation - in fact localisation of interface is not an issue at all
presently.
Let us discuss these in detail sometime on a separate thread.
Cheers,
- Hari Prasad