The word ‘translator’ has an interesting history. In the Anglo-Saxon language, ‘wealhstod’ meant “learned in Welsh” more or less, and described someone who could parlay with the important members of the local British tribes. As is often the case with invasions the British started to use the word, so the Welsh title ‘Gwalstawt’ means “interpreter of tongues”, i.e. the Welsh word for “can speak another language” originally meant “can speak Welsh” (there’s another word more closely related to Breton treiñ or Cornish trélya in Welsh, too; trosi).
Anyway, to see what localisation people go through during the l10n process, I decided the best thing to do was to try it myself. To save the time it would have taken to write an internationalised app, I used someone else’s; namely TextEdit. Here’s the result after about 90 minutes of work:
The first thing to notice is that I haven’t actually got much done yet. I’ve started working on the main menu NIB file (Edit.nib), and I’m about halfway through that. At this rate, it would take me at least a (working) day to finish – granted I’m no expert at the task, so I’m having to make a more heroic effort on otherwise “standard” translations than most localisers would. Although I do have a glossary to help. Even so, TextEdit is a fairly simple app; it’s easy to see that even if the translation became a mechanical process, translating a complex program would take a long time.
The other thing you might have noticed is that Mac OS X doesn’t actually support Old English, and yet that’s the language of my translation. There’s a simple trick here; convince Mac OS X that it does support Old English ;-). Type this command in the Terminal:
and Robert, as they say, is your father’s brother. Apps will now look for localised resources in ‘ang.lproj’ when they start, so that’s where your Old English resources live.
