OpenSourceArmenia

Dear Everyone,

got this message from Pablo of Mandrake i18n team, a sort of a project idea, I suppose...

Anoush

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From: Pablo Saratxaga Subject: Mandrake Linux in Armenian language Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 04:48:15 +0000

Kaixo!

I'm Pablo Saratxaga, i18n responsible for the Mandrake Linux distribution ( http://www.mandrakelinux.com/ ).

We give a lot of importance to the support of national languages, and for Armenian in particular I've been involved in the support of Armenian encoding armscii-8 in XFree86 (several years ago, at a time when UTF-8 wasn't that used yet), the inclusion of an Armenian locale in the GNU libc, a keyboard definition for both XFree86 and the console.

Mandrake Linux has been the first GNU/Linux system (and probably simply the first operating system too) to be able to handle typing and display of Armenian out of the box, several years ago. And I'm quite proud of that. However, despite that possibility, and the easy to enable it (it just requires to click on "Armenian" language in the first screen of the installation, and everything needed is installed and configured) it seems nobody noticed it, nobody tried to promotize it; as it can be seen on http://www.mandrakelinux.com/l10n/hy.php3 nothing has been translated yet (while a lot of other languages have some sort of translations, as can be seen in the global table at http://www.mandrakelinux.com/l10n/translations.php3 )

I would love to see Armenian translations, the language sure deserves a better presence on IT. However, as I don't speak Armenian myself, I don't know where to find potentially interested people.

Could you spred the word in Armenian language sites where there could be people interested in the translation of free software? The translation process is very easy, the files to translate can be donwloaded from the status page (by clicking on the percent values) and edited with a po-file editor, like kbabel or poedit; then send back for inclusion on the next releases.

For any question on the translating, or for help in enabling the Armenian support, just write me at pablo@mandrakesoft.com

Thanks

-- Ki ça vos våye bén, Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto] [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]