RISC OS Translation ?

Is there any desire/effort going into translating RISC OS for other languages ? I have no problem using RISC OS in english, but thought RO would “sell” more (especially with people buying RPi) if there was a mecanism to change the language for all messages of the OS. Having many untranslated apps living with a translated OS is not a problem since it can happen too in the Linux world (and people don’t seem to complain).

I can dig up my translated french ressources for anyone who wants to add them somewhere (from RO4).

There’s certainly a desire for more languages to be supported. German has been mentioned once or twice; I think you’re the first Frenchman to come forward. If you can release your French resources then that should be a good start. The build system is capable of producing multi-lingual ROMs, it’s just a case of getting all the translations we need.

I wonder if there are any tools hidden in CVS to allow easy detection of which messages need translation.

Here

http://www.a4com.de/riscos/down/IntlTerrV120all.zip

is the multilingual Terr.App. It works on my beagle with german.

Hello Jerome,

As a member of the Dutch Acorn/RISC OS User Group ‘Big Ben Club’ I made Dutch translations for RISC OS 3/4 in the past (http://www.dune.demon.nl/tabsoft/nl-soft.html). Currently we are developing a Dutch translation for RISC OS 5.19. We intend to release it in the spring of next year.

Got a question for the ROOL team. It’s nice that multiple language support is available in the ROM but are you going to release ROM-images with multiple languages, if for example I give you the Dutch messages for RISC OS 5? We would like to know this because we are still thinking about how to the distribute our translation.

It’s nice that multiple language support is available in the ROM but are you going to release ROM-images with multiple languages, if for example I give you the Dutch messages for RISC OS 5? We would like to know this because we are still thinking about how to the distribute our translation.

Isn’t this how it is supposed to work? That if you select a specific Territory, the languages appropriate to that Territory would be loaded as default (reverting to English if language blah not found)?

I have two questions for the ROOL team:

1. Is there a Territory hack/modifier available? I would be happy with French territory, but English language stuff. Alternatively would it be possible to tweak the English territory to contain various French attributes (comma for decimal point, currency is €, etc).
2. How does the Territory system handle situations where there are validly multiple languages (I’m thinking of Belgium and Switzerland here). Is there a sub-territory, or does one need to annoy the hell out of natives by setting the territory to French, not SwissFrench, say?
   What about situations such as Canadian French? Anybody who has “enjoyed” the sitcom “Catherine” on TV5FBS will be acutely aware that Canadian French is approximately NOTHING like French French. Watching the on-screen subtitles, it appears to me that not only are there a fair few words that are different (not to mention most of the curses seem based upon blasphemies, since when was “tabernacle” an insult?¹), but it seems that sentence structure differs as well. So maybe to a Canadian, stuff written in real French (cough!) looks like a Brit reading Shakespeare? ;-)

¹ The French have this awesome insult that is, let’s say if you say it to your boss you might not work there much longer. It’s “espèce de chameau”. Literally, you will be in a heated argument and then you will yell “you species of camel!”. Not a camel, but a species of camel. That really tickles me.

I hope I have not too much misunderstood. My English is very bad.
The tool would be the above link.
Quote: "Multilingual Territory Application (Release 1.20) full version
Configure tool with TConfig Territory including all current modules (Spain, Italy, France, Esperanto, Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland). Resources for RISC OS 4.0x (upd) and 5.0x German, and many more … "
What needs to be translated for each RISC OS version is in my knowledge Resources:$ … click menu to Apps on the icon bar.

Sorry if I should have misunderstood something.

Dick:

Got a question for the ROOL team. It’s nice that multiple language support is available in the ROM but are you going to release ROM-images with multiple languages, if for example I give you the Dutch messages for RISC OS 5? We would like to know this because we are still thinking about how to the distribute our translation.

Good question. The German translation that Raik is using is about 400KB in size. If we add German, French and Dutch to the ROM that could be an extra 1.2MB. I’ll email ROOL and point them towards this thread, I’m not sure how official the plans are to add translations to the ROM/disc. Maybe they’ll be happy with bigger ROMs, or maybe they’ve got some other plan.

Rick:

1. Is there a Territory hack/modifier available? I would be happy with French territory, but English language stuff. Alternatively would it be possible to tweak the English territory to contain various French attributes (comma for decimal point, currency is €, etc).

As far as I know there isn’t any tool available for tweaking territories. I think the easiest solution would be to build your own custom UK territory module.

2. How does the Territory system handle situations where there are validly multiple languages (I’m thinking of Belgium and Switzerland here). Is there a sub-territory, or does one need to annoy the hell out of natives by setting the territory to French, not SwissFrench, say?

Yes, there can be “sub-territories”. It looks like there’s only one territory for Belgium at the moment (not sure what language), but there are two for Canada, two for Russia, and (potentially) five for Switzerland. (The list is here, although I’m not sure what the warnings mean about using territory numbers > 127)

I’m not sure how official the plans are to add translations to the ROM/disc.

The boot sequence supports loading the territory messages/templates from !Territory, so I’m not sure there’s much to be gained by putting that data in ROM (though the build system does support it).

As there are no mask ROM minimum order quantities to worry about it wouldn’t be out of the question to just make lots of 1 territory foreign language ROMs either, aside from the admin burden of checking in ~100 new sets of messages to CVS, and burning auto builder run time which is paid for through donations to ROOL.

Adding some more territory modules to the ROM is on my roadmap (if ROOL will let me) since arguably they’re the bit that people can’t easily do themselves, and conversely I only have GCSE level foreign languages.

There are a couple of naughty modules which aren’t internationalised which would soon come out of the woodwork.

I can dig up my translated french ressources for anyone who wants to add them somewhere (from RO4).

That might be a useful starting point, but of course there are a number of extra modules and disc components in RISC OS 5, and a good number of corrections and additions to those that have been around for a while. You’d have to be really careful to make sure those are picked up.

I’m not sure what the warnings mean about using territory numbers > 127

The OS_Byte used to read and set the country has some meaning attached to bit 7, which in effect limits the number space. Ben’s comments in the UTF8 thread cover this.

I think that supporting different dialects would be nice but adding them into the romimage might overdo it.
It would be necessary to allow for ‘flavours’ meaning a base dataset like french french, and then a modification to make it, say, belgian french which changes the words for ‘90’ from ‘quatre-vinght-dis’ to ‘nonante’ for example.
Also austrian german and swiss german is quite different from german german. In addition bavarian german and german from cologne is also very different – maybe like cogney-english differs from cambridge-english?

Ah, and belgium also has a german region as well as italy..

maybe like cogney-english differs from cambridge-english?

Hehe, can you imagine an OS with menus in Cockney? Or worse, various “northern” dialects?
With thanks to TVTropes – Doris Day. No she didn’t.
[linked page is quite interesting reading, actually]

Having said this, there is a difference in regions where alternative words are used (70, 80, 90 in Belgium; navigateur in France vs the odd word the anti-English crowd came up with for Canadian French)… But this is very different to dialects, where devices are used in speech (“ee bye goom” or the Somerset abuse of “they”) which are simply not present in written language. I think a Valley Girl wannabe would freak if her computer popped up a message saying “Your computer just, like, totally went wrong, or something.” even if that is how she would have said it herself.

But this is very different to dialects, where devices are used in speech (“ee bye goom” or the Somerset abuse of “they”) which are simply not present in written language.

cough. Born in Yorkshire, living down south (midlands is south) and married to someone from the Black Country.
I am, you am, we am, they am is a perfect set for the Black Country (and damned logical), just as I be, you be, etc is in Somerset/West Country region. It’s a reflection of the linguistic roots still present in the regions that aren’t “darn sarf”
The Belgian example for 90 is I think a borrow from the Flemish (or vice versa)

On topic – wasn’t there an old RO programme that did translation to Valley (and others)?
Disc loaded translations might put a bit of fun in.

PS. T’ is often mispronouned by non-natives, simply because they pronounce it. It’s a glottal stop rather than an abrieviated word hence Mr. Mcintyre’s comment about the lack of “the” – imagine “Put – kettle on” with a pause where the “-” is

living down south (midlands is south)

Eeeeeeek! Anything higher up the map page than the Watford Gap is “north”. As for the region known as “tThe Midlands”, that’s a sort of dusty wilderness where The North hasn’t quite started yet (so the accents are still semi-comprehensible).

g,d&r

Looking for a possible RISC OS Valley Girl translator (I made one circa Y2K but it just bounced requests off a website so I wouldn’t count that…don’t think I ever publicly released it anyway); I noted that Google’s search is as uselessly random as ever, however, some fun stuff for a rainy Saturday:

• There’s a fan at Tiverton High School – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiverton_High_School#Computing
• RISC OS-tan (super-chibi style) – https://ostan-collections.net/imeeji/displayimage.php?pid=4483&fullsize=1 (not how I would have designed her, but nevermind…)
• Valley Girl programming language? Well, it started as a joke and then somebody wrote a parser for it. https://github.com/catseye/Dipple/blob/b498cfcac8531b0642e58ada945c71f2118c7767/erlang/valgol.erl [but it still doesn’t do anything useful, so I guess it is fairly true to life]
• You may know that you can select many languages for Google’s user interface. Japanese, Breton, Serbian, Dutch… but what you might not know is the menu has a few additions (such as Elmer Fudd, Klingon, and Pirate). https://www.google.com/preferences?languages#languages [it’d be cool to have Hymmnos as well, but I guess that would be too complex]

There you go, that ought to waste half an hour of development time (or more if you actually get involved in the definition of Hymnnos !)

Jeffrey Lee wrote:

Good question. The German translation that Raik is using is about 400KB in size. If we add German, French and Dutch to the ROM that could be an extra 1.2MB. I’ll email ROOL and point them towards this thread, I’m not sure how official the plans are to add translations to the ROM/disc. Maybe they’ll be happy with bigger ROMs, or maybe they’ve got some other plan.

Hello Jeffrey. Any news from the developers if they want to add extra languages in the official rom builds?

Hello Jeffrey. Any news from the developers if they want to add extra languages in the official rom builds?

Yes. As I understand it the plan is to add some extra territory modules to the ROM, but to continue to rely on !Territory for loading the necessary resources.

There are actually quite a lot of Territory modules in CVS – they’re build variants of castle/RiscOS/Sources/Internat/Territory/Module (Australia, Canada1, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Norway, SAfrica, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, UK, USA) – basically reflecting all the countries for which Acorn and Pace ever sold localised RISC OS products. Don’t be fooled by the Territory/Japan, Territory/UK and Territory/USA modules, they’re an older generation before the sources were merged.

Starting with RISC OS 3.19 (the only localised desktop version of the OS to my knowledge), and heavily used in embedded products, the RISC OS build system lets you configure a build so that the localised resources (Messages files etc) are for some territory other than UK. This is a completely different approach from !Territory, which German, Dutch and other non-English-speaking Risc PC users are more familiar with – I guess it just wasn’t economically viable to make masked ROMs for Risc PCs for alternative localities.

I don’t think the ROM modules in general currently support there being more than one set of localised resources in ROM at the same time – for example everything that tried to open Resources:$.Resources.<Module>.Messages would need to try suffixes according to the configured territory number. Not that it couldn’t be added, but it would be a tedious task. Plus, it would probably cause ROM size problems for older machines (IOMD and Iyonix) if we started putting multiple sets of resources in there. So the options are to (in the style of embedded RISC OS) produce one customised ROM per language per machine – which would mean an awful lot of ROM images – or to stick with !Territory, which I get the impression is the preferred approach in the community in general.

As a native English speaker, I’ve never had to rely on !Territory. I did try one once out of curiosity, but I can’t say I’m very familiar with how it works. I don’t see any official documentation of it in the PRMs or in Acorn’s application notes – does anyone know if there ever was any documentation of it? I’m not even sure whether !Territory can hold resources for more than one language or not…

Very interesting stuff, Ben. Where can I find a !Territory that would be ARMv7 compatible (nowhere to be found in “Downloads”) ?
I only have one for my RPC

Take this Multilingual Territory Application (Release 1.20) full version

http://www.a4com.de/riscos/down/IntlTerrV120all.zip

from www.riscos.de

Take this Multilingual Territory Application (Release 1.20) full version

http://www.a4com.de/riscos/down/IntlTerrV120all.zip

from www.riscos.de

Ah, I overlooked your link the 1st time. Thanks Raik

Could someone correct me if I have got this cock-eyed, but are there two aspects to Territories?

First, is to ensure a machine boots up with the correct current Territory for where the user is. I think that is the purpose of the !Territory configuration app in the absence of specially compiled roms. From what I can see it does not use standard Territory modules.

Second, additional Territory modules can be loaded and then information can be derived from them through the Territory SWIs. The current Territory can be changed if the appropriate Territory module is loaded.

In the latter case, there seemed to be a dearth of Territory modules publicly available, but perhaps I should trawl the CVS.

My interest in this was with the datetime keywords in Basalt I wrote some years back. I found it tricky testing them because I could only change current Territory by re-configuring and rebooting. Was there an easier way?

Could someone correct me if I have got this cock-eyed, but are there two aspects to Territories?

That’s right.
There’s the territory manager, to which many territory modules can be registered, only one of which is selected via *TERRITORY.
There’s the territory application, that’s mostly a container for territory resources (templates, messages etc).

If on boot up the configured territory module is found to be absent it is searched for in various likely places (NetFS, the boot drive, possibly some others I forgot), and if in none of those places you get the big blue floppy disc icon to invite you to load the stuff off floppy.

In the latter case, there seemed to be a dearth of Territory modules publicly available, but perhaps I should trawl the CVS.

You should still have the modules I put online from when you asked that exact same question last time, no? The (slow but steady) process of ditching dead wood modules is in preparation of putting the territory modules in ROM.

Yes, I do have them, and I tested with them, many thanks. But that was only 3. I think that still counts as a dearth. ;-)

Is the !Territory application the one I have on my RPC written by Andreas Feldner et al from 2004? Else there is a confusion of names. AFAICT that one uses a patching method to implement territories, not modules.

But that was only 3

They were carefully chosen to give you one sample of each of -ve, 0, +1, large +ve timezones, any more would cause unnecessary wear on my index finger.