Users of localized operating systems
Yesterday night, over an exchange of mails a few friends narrowed down the root cause of the misbehaving OpenOffice.org (the rendering for a particular document was off-the-charts on one distribution, but was pretty much sane on another). All of that led me to think that given that Indic Localization has been the talk-of-the-town for over four years now, and pretty much available through major Linux distributions for the past two years, there has not been a large number of folks actually using localized Linux. That’s kind of sad if that is true, it is really a bad thing if folks actually use it but don’t talk about it.
Let’s take the case which kept a few of us busy last evening. The original poster “uses” localization bits. Being a writer, he’s affected by fonts, input methods, rendering and printing bits. Anything that means:
+ installation or re-installation of the Operating System
+ fiddling around with various fonts
+ tweaking input methods
+ rebuilding/recompiling applications
is a waste of hours which take the writer away from the core task. Somewhere along the way it might be time to start thinking about “users” like our writer to see how localization help them do the work (while also being booted into a local language environment). There would be various types:
o the blue-sky users from the ICT4D group who require the L10n on the user interface to enable to be part of “inclusive computing”
o users of various eGovernance projects who require L10n framework (input-rendering-output) to get the various kinds of transaction down
o the users (like our writers) who use tools and not really the OS and expect the tools to be “L10n aware”
The current mode of Indic Localization aim to meet the requirement of the first two groups (second more than the first perhaps), but what we don’t seem to be getting into the third group into the game. Given that spinning out a custom distribution (and LiveMedia) has become so much easier across distributions it would be a good idea to have feedback loops going by getting the third group involved. Localization of late has attained the unfortunate tag of “string crunching”. Fact remains that L10n does mean that but actually means much more than the very restricted comprehension of the term. Thus, the greater the number of folks using L10n bits the better it is in terms of being enriched.
In a side note, these two were incidents of yesterday and trivially interesting.
[…] The last point is somewhat telling. There are not many bugzilla entries related to l10n from a usage model or even from a document consumption model. So, even though a significant number of installation, administration and deployment guides are available in the local language (at least for RHEL), there is little or nothing in terms of feedback that can improve the documents. Sometime back I had written about users of localised operating systems. This is an area which Indic l10n might require to address to get at a seamless experience. The current method of asking for guidance on multiple lists some of which mostly end up as “change the operating system to get better experience” is not really a way forward. Rather, it is a huge step backward. For Fedora to become extremely popular in non English speaking places - we need to reach out and record the current issues that high touch users of non English systems have. The current process/workflow generally includes folks who are fluent in their mother tongue and English and generally use English as the language of choice for daily work. It is the other huge group who are perhaps fluent in one or two languages but explicitly use the mother tongue for daily work that should be the focus now. […]
Pingback by Random Thoughts » A small matter of language — August 31, 2007 @ 11:00 am
[…] OpenOffice.org as an application forms an important means to ensure that there are “users” of localized operating system environments. As more and more citizen centric applications move towards the web (and that’s another rock solid reason for you to attend the Mozilla Project Day too), the data archival and transaction would be required to be undertaken using Open Standards (read that as ODF). This is where OpenOffice.org comes into the picture. However, this is a pretty simplistic elucidation of the scenario which would perhaps appeal to the developers who would like to contribute to OpenOffice.org through creating extensions and experience enhancers (hint: the Project Day has all that). What the Project Day should allow the OpenOffice.org team is to understand how the “standards battle” transcends mere developer interest and meshes into user interest as well as get them talking about the Education Project. The general idea behind the Project Day is to ensure that there is an increase in the quantum of developer contribution which is not only limited to translation of the UI, but extending into QA among other things. This of course does not exclude the sharing of war stories related to migration, widgets and plug-ins created around the application. What the team expects is a healthy dose of interaction and free flow of ideas which can be made part of the various sub projects that make up OpenOffice.org […]
Pingback by Random Thoughts » Exactly what are you waiting for ? — November 12, 2007 @ 4:24 pm