[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2012-09-18

[Chris Leonard]

On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 3:53 PM, S. Daniel Francis
<francis at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> 2012/9/23 Agustin Zubiaga Sanchez <aguz at sugarlabs.org>:

>> About the young programmers:
>> I was a student of Flavio Danesse, and he taught me a lot but for obvious
>> reasons I had to appeal the internet to found more information, where the
>> most are in english, for me it wasn't a problem, because I have learned
>> english..
>>
>> But the most of the children in Latin America hasn't this luck, and they
>> find it difficult to program.
>
> I'd say now there's a lot of documentation in Spanish, but I agree
> with you in the language can be a barrier sometimes, specially for
> write e-mails and similar things.
> When Flavio said he doesn't understand why Spanish speakers write
> source code in English, I replied I don't write code in English, I
> write in Python, in C (not for Sugar) or in any programming language.

It is true that the language one speaks when programming is the
computer's language.  However, while is not important which language
one uses for the UI strings as long as the users understand it, I
would like to encourage all Sugar developers to write for an
international audience by using gettext and generating English POT
files.

The argument for porting a stable branch of your UI strings to English
and generating a POT from there is the simple and practical argument
that English is the common language of our localization community.  By
all means, one should develop and test with Spanish UI strings if that
is easiest, but please consider taking that next step to an
internationalized activity (with English POT) when you have something
you are proud of having developed and would like to share it with
non-Spanish speakers.

We are fortunate to have many developers that are "trilingual"
(Spanish, English, Python) that are willing to help with this
important step to make activities from Spanish-speaking developers
available to children in any of the languages represented by our L10n
community.  I would love to see more of the Spanish-only activities
present in ASLO take this step to i18n so that they can be used by
other XO kids around the world in their mother tongues.

Warmest Regards,

cjl
Sugar Labs Translation Team Coordinator