OS RISC yn Cymraeg?

I recently came across this very old post https://www.tes.com/news/when-pc-non-pc It is from 1996, and most of the actual contents are not at all relevant any more, but I found this passage interesting:

MEU Cymru oversees the provision of Welsh language software. Its lengthy catalogue, which contains translations of many of the best known Acorn titles (Genesis, Impression etc), has only a handful of Windows products. “Over the years we have built up an excellent working relationship with British software houses who allow us to customise their programs. The way the code is written makes it relatively easy and cheap to incorporate the Welsh text.”
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The Risc Os interface has also been translated, so it’s possible for pupils to use computers without ever having to resort to English. This is crucial for teachers anxious to reinforce the vital message that Welsh isn’t only a language of hymns and eisteddfodau.

This seems to indicate that there is – somewhere – a complete localisation of Risc OS in Welsh, including several core Apps, but as far as I can tell it isn’t part of the ROOL source. I doubt that there is much of a chance of seeing Risc OS dominate Welsh schools again, but it would be fun if it were possible to use ROOL in Welsh, I think, at least if the work of localisation is already done. Does anyone know if it might exist and who might own the license?

MEU Cymru seem to still exist (though the page looks like it too hasn’t been updated since 1996 ⁰). Maybe I should drop them a line?

⁰ http://www.meucymru.co.uk/ – is that perhaps even a Risc PC in their logo..?

The issue here is that we would need to involve native speakers in order to avoid problems like:

That means having a native speaker who understands the terminology and is willing to take on the task of translating. Oh, and as a volunteer.

There’s a reason I don’t provide French translations. I understand French, I can work my way around an OS in French, but if I was to write the texts myself, you’d either get gibberish or very eccentric expressions (pretty much how I speak ;-) ).

Haha! Wonderful mistake! No, the idea hinges entirely on it being already done, wrth gwrs.

For those of unfortunate enough not to speak Welsh, what does the Welsh version of that sign actually say please? (Assuming it’s not rude of course.)

ISTR that the Master Compact outer box’s Spanish translation of manufacturing origin was something along the lines of “Made in the United Reindeer”

For those of unfortunate enough not to speak Welsh, what does the Welsh version of that sign actually say please? (Assuming it’s not rude of course.)

“I’m not in the office at the moment. Send any translation work.” :)

“I’m not in the office at the moment. Send any translation work.”

That’s how google translate renders it.

Plainly when sending something for translation, it would be sensible to try a reverse translation. Mind you, I do remember when Google translate first appeared, we tried translating something from English to French, then French to German, then German to English. “Chinese Whispers” at their best.

Plainly when sending something for translation, it would be sensible to try a reverse translation.

Depends a lot on the languages involved and how they interact.

https://www.translationparty.com/ :-)

Try: Make spasmodic mistakes and then go left beside the one with the salty sausages minced finaly, forever a wandering carrot.
It finds equilibrium quickly, settling on something that’s even more nonsensical.

I did a bit of Welsh translation last week

very strange result. I have sent feedback.

n.b.There was dingbat of C&Y with the ampersand smaller than the C Y. I eventually found out (without any help from google translate) CY is welsh for sweet.

Googlewelsh is notoriously strange, but that one takes the biscuit!

very strange result. I have sent feedback.

The problem is that translation can be gamed if you suggest a better translation and it is automatically accepted. Clearly somebody has been gaming the thing and tried to make Cy point to jw.org/en which is the church of annoyances where Buddy Jesus looks like Chuck Norris because they couldn’t handle the idea that he probably looked like Yasser Arafat.

Good for reporting it. I have as well so maybe, just maybe, it’ll eventually get fixed.

CY is welsh for sweet.

Sweet as in tastes sugary?
Sweet as in kind?
Sweet as in cute?
Sweet as in gummy bears?

Sweet as in gummy bears?

I thought I’d seen a post suggesting “Sweet as in gummy bears?” I went to find it and now conclude CY is not Welsh for sweet. CY seems to be used as an abbreviation for Cymraeg (The welsh name for welsh) The answer to the dingbat was given as “Short and sweet” so the dingbat creator though CY=sweet but I don’t know why!

My Welsh is not great (I could probably survive in Argentina, but that’s about it). I’ve never seen sweet translated as cy. As an adjective, chweg, melys, or pêr are the most common ways of describing something as sweet, I think. Chweg and melys imply that something is pleasant, while pêr suggests deliciousness. There’s a bit of a North/South divide (sort of; it’s complicated), but I can’t for the life of me remember which word is more common at which end of the Valleys.

chweg, melys, or pêr are the most common ways of describing something as sweet,

Melys is obviously related to honey by comparison with the French miele.

Chweg sounds alarmingly like “sugar” when you realise that the “W” is a “U” sound!

You only have to have seen an “ambiwlans” behind you in the mirror to get that one!

I may have a Welsh name and be able to pronounce some Welsh words (including that Anglesey railway station) with a certain authenticity, but my knowledge of the language stops there!

However, my interest in etymology knows no bounds, and I will speculate to my heart’s content!

Melys is obviously related to honey by comparison with the French miele.

The Welsh for honey is mêl so you could be on to something there.

Chweg sounds alarmingly like “sugar” when you realise that the “W” is a “U” sound!

W also sounds like a W in some circumstances – including this one. I think that the rule is if it precedes another vowel, but I’m not certain. To say chweg you need to start with half a pint of phlegm in the back of your throat.

Welsh and English, in their various iterations, have danced around each other for centuries, and there is lots of borrowing in both directions. What is really interesting is that the loan words in the dialects generally spoken at the Southern end of Wales are often quite different to the ones in use at the Northern end. I use “North” and “South” very loosely, because the dialects do have a tendency to, erm, wander all over the Principality and depending on how you count there are as few as three or as many as seven. That doesn’t stop endless arguments between people in the South, who speak proper Welsh (cough), and the Gogs (from gogledd, “north”) who just think they do. It’s something to do when it is raining. Which is often.

Q: Did the English borrow trousers from the Welsh word trowsus or was it the other way around?
A: They both borrowed it from Scots Gaelic trubhas.

Strange what random facts one remembers!

people in the South, who speak proper Welsh (cough), and the Gogs (from gogledd, “north”) who just think they do. It’s something to do when it is raining. Which is often.

I live near (on the “Wirral”) Liverpool, reputedly the capital of North Wales, where messages are transmitted downwards via the Liverpool Echo to its subjects, ’tis said!

Nostau.

Nostau?

Dw i’n wedi blino. Nos da.

The welsh name for welsh

Unlikely. “welsh” is an Old English term for foreigner / slave.

Comes through Anglo-Saxon from a Germanic word I think.

Then again, they are strange over there so saying “I’m proud to be a foreign slave” is possible :)

I’m not sure what you are objecting to here: Cy is a commonly used abbreviation for either Cymru (Wales in Welsh) or Cymraeg (Welsh in Welsh). Furthermore, the meaning of “Welsh” as “unfree/foreign” seems to be etymologically secondary ⁰, i.e it originally came from the name of a particular Celtic tribe in modern day France, mutated to mean foreigner (as in speaker of a foreign language ¹) and then non-free. And then of course back to describing a people and language. (By the way, sugar in Welsh is “siwgr” – a loan word from English, most likely.)

I just realised, by the way, that the title of this topic should be “SW RISC yn Gymraeg” – mutations of consonants is one of the more interesting features of Celtic languages ².

Anyway, I take it the interest in digging up old localisations is lukewarm at best? (On a side note, I think my Archimedes is localised to Swedish, but it hasn’t been up and running in years, so I might be misremembering.)

⁰ https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=welsh

¹ This even made it into Swedish in the form of “rotvälska” – gibberish ².

² As a non-native speaker of English, German and Welsh, I must say that Welsh has a very much undeserved bad reputation for incompressibility. Both spelling and pronunciation are much more regular and predictable than English, and probably Swedish as well. The grammar is different, but also much more regular than both English and – I would say – German (no idea about Swedish grammar, it isn’t something you think about as a native…).

Anyway, I take it the interest in digging up old localisations is lukewarm at best? (On a side note, I think my Archimedes is localised to Swedish, but I haven’t had it up and running in years, so I might be misremembering.)

I would like to know what localisations there are available in general.

I’m not sure what you are objecting to here: Cy is a commonly used abbreviation for either Cymru (Wales in Welsh) or Cymraeg (Welsh in Welsh).

It was the “Welsh for Welsh” bit – that’s an English (or should that be Anglish) term largely attached to the inhabitants and language of the principality of Wales where the proper term is, Cymraeg spoken in Cymru, as everyone has noted and seemingly forgotten in seconds.

I must say that Welsh has a very much undeserved bad reputation for incompressibility. Both spelling and pronunciation are much more regular and predictable than English

The English language is, erm, unusual.
I’m not sure whether there is a language on the planet that hasn’t “contributed” to the list of many and varied words. We “borrow” from everyone.

I’m not sure what you are objecting to here: Cy is a commonly used abbreviation for either Cymru (Wales in Welsh) or Cymraeg (Welsh in Welsh).

It was the “Welsh for Welsh” bit – that’s an English (or should that be Anglish) term largely attached to the inhabitants and language of the principality of Wales where the proper term is, Cymraeg spoken in Cymru, as everyone has noted and seemingly forgotten in seconds.

I must say that Welsh has a very much undeserved bad reputation for incompressibility. Both spelling and pronunciation are much more regular and predictable than English

The English language is, erm, unusual.

I’m not sure whether there is a language on the planet that hasn’t “contributed” to the list of many and varied words. We “borrow” from everyone.

On topic, a translation of RO messaging would be interesting. Aren’t some of the Pi’s manufactured in Wales?

This seems to indicate that there is – somewhere – a complete localisation of Risc OS in Welsh, including several core Apps, but as far as I can tell it isn’t part of the ROOL source.

There would have been no requirement to feed that back to Acorn (and hence for it to end up in the ROOL sources), since the Territory system displaces the English text when loaded. In 2012 there was an at least partially complete German translation from a4com but that’s offline now by the looks of it.

Project Bethany was a multilingual translation effort for the Bush Internet TV, and the output of that project (in code changes terms) is in the ROOL sources, for example there are mentions of it in the TerritoryModule change logs. The translation work itself seems to have been done by Alpnet, and I guess either they or Bush retained the rights to the translation. It probably wouldn’t be much use anyway as it’d have been for things like ANT Fresco rather than a full desktop OS.

Since RISC OS 5.20 (or maybe 5.18, I’ve forgotten) each stable release has come with a set of untranslated resources, ie. before tokenisation. One of the stable release criteria for ROM modules is that they must use message translation, though disc based stuff can have English baked in, so for a stable release ROM at least anyone can make a start on translating right away.

A quick survey of the IOMD messages shows there are around 5800 tokens. If you took 2 minutes per line, that’s 25 days’ solid translation work (obviously some lines will be quicker, but I’ve ignored the Templates and Res files in that count, and testing time).

For disc based stuff it’s rather inconvenient that applications only carry one set of Messages/Templates at a time, while Toolbox apps can carry many (with the Res/Messages files suffixed by territory number). A sensible improvement to that would be to have MessageTrans/the Wimp try a numeric suffix before falling back to the unsuffixed name, though I’m aware that’s partly what 3rd party ResFind does it seems an obvious and simple thing for the OS to do – it tries for Sprite suffixes already after all.

In the BonusBin download there’s a handful of Territory modules and instructions how to make a Territory application. Unfortunately there’s a gaping chasm between saying “RISC OS should come with more translations” and being able to say “RISC OS comes with more translations”.

If you took 2 minutes per line, that’s 25 days’ solid translation work (obviously some lines will be quicker, but I’ve ignored the Templates and Res files in that count, and testing time).

I’d better get started on Swedish then! :) I’ve also sent an email to MEU Cymru asking about whether they retain any of the text (I made it clear that I am not affiliated with ROOL, just interested). If nothing else, it will give +1 exposure.