Microsoft Plans to Create Local Language Software 480
zensufi writes "CNET News has a story stating that Microsoft has announced plans for a program to help governments produce local language versions of key Microsoft applications, giving the software giant a hedge against a growing international threat from open-source software." The piece explains: 'The Local Language Program will provide local and regional governments with "language interface packs" that government and academic developers can use to produce localized versions of the Windows XP operating system and Office 2003 productivity package.'
open source challenges?? (Score:2, Insightful)
erm (Score:1, Insightful)
creating them now? i've already got one, it's called "Windows XP Multilingual User Interface" kit.
Freeloading (Score:4, Insightful)
What Gall (Score:5, Insightful)
For $400 a pop you would have thought they could have done this themselves.
Uhhh, how is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)
Localized versions of Windows have been available for years as well.
Now they DARE to Localize Applications?! THOSE BASTARDS!!!
Credit where credit is due (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux forced it. (Score:4, Insightful)
in spite of the government wanting to fund the
whole project.
Now, with Linux supporting all sorts of weird
stuff like Welsh and a zillion Indian languages,
Microsoft is losing out in places. All those
little annoying-to-support markets add up.
Is MS 'Seeing th Light'? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what license is to be used for these translations, written by third parties? Will Microsoft try and demand ownership, or at least commandeer a right to unlimited use of the translation?
If it is legally possible, it would be a really interesting experiment to write a translation and release it under the GPL, then sit back and watch the reaction.
Aren't they just outsourcing (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that backward? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shouldn't that be the other way around? Why should governments be doing Microsoft's work? If Microsoft wants to sell in upper Mongolia, it ought to make the effort to localize its own damn software for that market.
If you ask me, this is just one more example of Microsoft's incredible hubris.
Re:Wow translating their software to other languag (Score:5, Insightful)
Where I come from... we call this competition! You know, where different organizations tailor their products to a given market and duke it out to see who succeeds.
Comment removed (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Good on Microsoft - mod PARENT UP (Score:2, Insightful)
I think this will be the first of a whole series of changes, which should be good for everyone who doesn't depend of closed IP.
.net feels weak because it is not mature like java (Score:2, Insightful)
How many new security holes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:open source challenges?? (Score:2, Insightful)
What version, Office 95 before Unicode? Office 2000 works just fine with Japanese text letting me enter horizontal or vertical right to left. It even came with all the fonts and IME. And it's just the normal US version.
The localized versions have worked since the 3.x days.
Re:Just translating may not be enough... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:open source challenges?? (Score:2, Insightful)
So, while we argue about licenses... (Score:2, Insightful)
While we argue and sue each other over dinosaur mascots...
While we debate Open Source versus Free Software versus GPL versus LGPL...
Microsoft is adding more features to their products...
What percentage of the desktop does MS own now? 90%? 95%?
Wonder why? I don't.
We could always stop majoring on the minors and make better software... but's that just me.
Re:Isn't that backward? (Score:4, Insightful)
MS is going about it in a brilliant strategic way. They realize that it is not financially worthwhile for them to do it themselves. Instead they are getting the help of user who might want to use their product.
Right now upper Mongolia doesnt have a customised version of Linux or Windows. There is nothing to stop Upper Mongolia from creating a language pack for KDE. What MS has done is to provide an alternative to that, maybe at a lower cost.
Re:open source challenges?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, it does.
Get with the flow of the discussion, chum. Office for the Mac doesn't support right to left languages. That's a big reason why Israel's government has their ban. Of course, being adjudged a monopoly was the other reason.
Yeah, the original poster should have been a touch more specific but....
Please help us increase our profits! (Score:5, Insightful)
But here we have a company with over $60 billion in the bank, pulling in more than $1 billion per month in pure profits, raking in unheard of profit margins on their products, and they are asking local and regional governments to provide them with gratis localization services.
Shameful.
Esperanto? Klingon? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, so it's only "governments" that rate, hmm?
No help for the Esperanto community, I guess.
Though it wouldn't surprise me to find Microsoft courting the Klingon-speaking community
-kgj
Just enough to hold off the competition (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft is doing this to compete with Linux. Since there aren't any decent grammar checkers for Linux, they are not going to worry about it.
yeah, that sounds like a "microsoft innovation" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Uhhh, how is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)
The last time I tried to search for an answer, the only one I found was: buy an English version, back-up everything, install English version, restore from backup. This is a far cry from setting your LANG envvar.
While I'm at it, I can complain that under this version of the OS, a whole bunch of English-language software seems to have uglified small fonts, sometimes to the point of illegibility.
Oh, and how do you enter full-width katakana from the command prompt? It seems impossible. Which makes entering the localized name of the Local Area Connection tricky in netsh. (As far as I can tell, you have to cut and paste the name.)
Not to mention the way that the IME taskbar widget regularly gets obscured by other taskbar widgets making changing input settings a pain in the neck. Microsoft's own deskswitcher application is a particular offender in this regard.
Sure it has localization, but it doesn't appear to be especially well thought out (infamously bad translations aside), and certainly its internationalization quality leaves something to be desired.
Eh.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just translating may not be enough... (Score:2, Insightful)
Rubi text is made up of small characters (usually kana) appearing above other text, called oyamoji. You can control the size of rubi text as well as how it is spaced and aligned with respect to its underlying oyamoji text. Your settings affect rubi text throughout a document.
While I never used it myself, I always was struck how FrameMaker offered more control over this type of text then every other application. I never saw anything like it in any other app (including OOo!).
ed
(offtopic, but I wish FrameMaker was OSS as well so I could run through and Carbonize it...)
Why doesn't Microsoft pay for it? (Score:3, Insightful)
With all their billions in the bank, why can't they just pay for the translations? I can't believe that a government would spend resources doing translation work for Microsoft.
Of course, M$ is going to try to get away with not having to pay for it. But I doubt governments (and of course just those of relatively low-population countries) will want to assist funding for them, seeing as how they have such a huge war chest.
I feel confident that gov's will prefer to fund translation on Linux, and M$ will be forced to pay for the their own translation anyway, if they want to get into the market.
Re:What Gall (Score:5, Insightful)
First, you're an insensitive clod.
Second, the money that we get comes from a mix of payments made by students and funded legislated by the state. Neither of those sources are eager to part with their cash, and in order to earn it, the institution has to provide value.
Part of proviing value in our case is delivering the maximum service for the smallest outlay of cash. In other words, you're damn skippy we have to pinch our pennies, often to the point of under-funding projects, begging for grant money, and underpaying the staff and faculty. This we do in the name of providing a higher education, because there's no money to be made here. Only reputations.
The trick is to pinch the pennies in ways that appear extravegant and bold, to "show" that we're a competitive, forward-thinking institution with the future in mind.
Re:open source challenges?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea, and in typical volunteer FOSS fashion, of the 79 language teams [kde.org], 11 have done enough work to be considered useful. Chinese and Japanese, the two most important, are only half translated.
You can bet the 35 Office XP localizations are a bit more polished. That's what profit can do for you.
Re:So, while we argue about licenses... (Score:3, Insightful)
You make it sound like Microsoft is leading the pack, when in fact they are trying to catch up with the rest. All big Linux distro's have supported localisation (including the most obscure languages) for years. Mac OSX is even better in this respect, as all OSX apps support localization (you can even write your own by creating an XML file with the translated strings and adding it to the app) and uses unicode throughout, so I can just cut-and-paste Japanese text from some odd robot site from my browser into a translator and have systrans translate it for me.
Since a large proportion of desktop users is forced to use windows, this is a step in the right direction, but don't try to spin this into MS innovation hype.
I'll be impressed when windows comes multilingual out of the box like all sane operating systems (just choose your language at install time), or when it doesn't complain when I try to network two computers using the same build of the OS, but different language editions.
Re:Linux forced it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Native Americans/Indians were called Indians because the purpose of Columbus's excursion was to discover an alternate route to India. When they got here they realized it wasn't India but decided to call it the West Indies anyway. They also realized the people here weren't Indians but called them Red Indians.
Re:Wow translating their software to other languag (Score:3, Insightful)
Tantrum? I'm delighted. In order to protect their monopoly on all fronts they are spreading their resources thinner and thinner in order to combat the various threats from competitors, open Source and open standards (for instance Linux, Open Office/Star Office, Java, XML, Mobile platforms) This means loss of focus, low quality, delayed releases. And hopefully their downfall.
Re:Just translating may not be enough... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because they're aware doesn't necessarily mean they take their own knowlege into account. Does Messenger support vertical text for Japanese (or AIM, or iChat for that matter...I honestly don't know)? Is the user interface assumed for these apps even usable for vertical text input and display? I know my IM text input line is at the bottom of the chat window and near assumes top to bottom text ordering.
It's easy for programmers who know no language aside from English or a Romance language to make these fundamental assumptions about language orientation. Nothing aside from changing the code or design of the program is going to help.
Mozilla still doesn't support the standard
At least Mozilla provides concerned governments or localization teams the source code to the program so they can try to fix the problem. The potential for full localization is present in OSS apps even if not yet fully realized.
ed
Re:open source challenges?? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not quite true. Certainly, their translated versions of Windows, Office and so on are very well done, but there's one very major problem with them: they're each separate versions.
I want English, my wife wants German. It's not possible to install a Windows box so that we both get what we want - we have to choose one and we're stuck with it. OpenOffice is the same (both Windows and Unix versions). Other software is designed to be more flexible. - see KDE, for example.
While I'm here: a lot of (non-Microsoft) Windows apps break language related things by hardcoding them. "Program Files" is "Programme" in German, and the "Startup" folder in the Start menu is called "Autostart". These names are dynamically available from the system, and it's annoying when badly coded programs put things in the wrong places.
I find it interesting that Microsoft recently refused to do Hebrew and IIRC Arabic, but suddenly announces Welsh, which doesn't have as many users. They lost business to Linux because of their earlier refusal, and I'm sure that that loss, coupled with the recent KDE announcements about Niedersaechsisch has forced a rethink.
There is a lot of work to do before OSS catches up, but there is a lot of local interest in things like translations - you don't need an IT background to get involved, which was a big barrier for many. At least one German university is actively involved in translating KDE, as part of its language studies. I'm sure that a fair amount of OSS will overtake Microsoft in this area, now that well designed frameworks are in place.
-- Steve
Microsoft feels the heat in Malaysia (Score:2, Insightful)
We used the local language support fact to persuade our government to use Open Source. Now, Microsoft feel the heat and tried to pursue the same path as ours!
Shame to them! They are really a cheap imitator. ;)
Me - Fedora, Mandrake, Nano and Abiword translator
Re:Wow translating their software to other languag (Score:3, Insightful)
What antimonopolistic evil behaviour!
Actually customizing their products to different markets. UN FRICKIN BELIEVABLE.
Now throw yer tantrum kids.
Actually it is likely a smokescreen. Microsoft has long touted their localization efforts while in reality avoiding numerous locales even when they have lots of customers in those locales. In the case of Hebrew, they declared there would never be Hebrew language versions of their software even though the Israeli government offered to pay for the development and ultimately even to supply the developers if that is what it took. Microsoft said NO.
Now they are claiming they will work with local governments in localizing MS Software? I will believe it when I see it.