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June 04, 2003

Localisation Effort

Sven-S. Porst: Translating

Once you know the other language sufficiently, getting the message across somehow isn’t too hard. However, getting it across with the text feeling right and belonging naturally to the other language, seems very hard to me. I certainly have great respect for translators of novels that make you not realise the novel wasn’t written in the language you’re reading it in.

It’s a piece well written by someone who really got the view, done it, ever been the bridge between 2 different culture. In my opinion, translation never as easy as it sound. You got to be very good in the target language as having the fair understanding of the source. And it ain’t enough if your target is to let the result be sound “natural”.

It’s even worse in world of Chinese, and worst in Computer field. As everybody knew, most computer terms came from English. It is obviously for IT people (programmer, sys admin…) to recognize the terms in English, even though their mother tongue isn’t English. However, there always need for translated words for ordinary people. It become a mess while there are various Chinese translations of Taiwan, China mainland, Hong Kong…(Malaysia and Singapore mostly follow but variant too occasionally). So you got to be specified in translating a English essay to Chinese encoding in Big5 (Taiwan) or GB3212 (China), there are different terms used for a single word. There are people pushing to use the original technical terms in computer books, since readers would still have to know/familiar the word, because English dominate the field at the mean time (not forsee to be changed though).

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Call for Mozilla Switch, part 3

You’ve heard about the reasons, maybe it’s time to get motivated by listening to people who’ve just trying it out or switched. Joel’s recent comment on Mozilla Firebird has attacted lots of notice, and quite a number of people inspired by him to try out Mozilla Firebird.

What is Mozilla Firebird anyway? First of all, Mozilla is actually refer to a suite of browser softwares that including a Web Browser, Mail & News application and Chatting application. It’s an Open Source project, along the way of development, the development effort has forked quite a number of different project under its name (Mozilla). For example, tools helping software development: Bugzilla, Tinderbox, Bonsai. Mozilla Firebird, previously named Phoenix, is one of the Mozilla projects. It is a standalone browser, with redesign of Mozilla’s browser component.

Comments/Experience from people trying out Mozilla or switched to

Noted most of the following links are copied from adot’s notblog. Thanks for the effort and ping, adot! :)

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Call for Mozilla Switch, part 2

Are 6 reasons enough to convince you to switch? No? Let’s make it 10.

7. Font resizing
Mozilla is a clear winner over IE on resizing the text size of viewing web pages. You might have encountered many situations where IE can’t resize the eye-hurting font size properly. Mozilla handle that better and give you more scale on resizing.

8. Security
One day, you might find your IE behave weird:

You are getting parasites. It could be checked by pointing your IE to here. As it explained parasites:

‘Parasite’ is a shorthand term for “unsolicited commercial software” — that is, a program that gets installed on your computer which you never asked for, and which does something you probably don’t want it to, for someone else’s profit.

Many parasites installed their softwares through IE’s ActiveX installation option. It could be avoid by carefully answer the popup question from websites, or guard it by always ensure you got latest patches/updates from Microsoft, or protected with third party software. However, most people are ignorant of these tactic. And that put IE users under higher risk to get those annoying parasites, which waste your CPU power, and even worse, make your surfing uncomfortable.

Mozilla? It’s out of this mess.

9. Users’ voice heard
You sure would gain better control over the browser with Mozilla. And you could join the community if you like. Lots of thing you could do though you aren’t technical savvy: test beta product, sending bug report…etc. If you act politely and do your homework, the community would give you the best support you’d ever have, much better quality, and faster than the paid support. Paid support? You ask. “But IE is free?” You did paid, don’t you. Remember, *it’s part of the OS*.

10. Last, but not least, is the overall improved experience
Using Mozilla is in fact, kind of learning process. It giving you a different view of the world. Alright, you couldn’t care less, it’s OK. If other reasons is enough for you to try it out, you’d feel like to stay with it. There might still have websites where the web developer is too Microsoft-minded, so it was designed only for IE. That you could keep the option to use IE just for the purpose, for example, your internet banking site.

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