Talking the same language

After seeing the questions I’ve been asked in my personal blog, I’m going to digress in this one to continue talking about the issue of extending to other territories. Although our manifesto–an internal document so far–clearly expresses our ideology, the way we do things and how we do them, there’s a clear point that says everything: we’re standardists.

In the company’s internal language, this means that we are subject to choosing the planet’s least proprietary standards as far as possible. Although this is a difficult task, it has lightened our work substantially so far, it always takes a long time of reflecting and testing to avoid irreparable errors. This adoption gives rise to: an XHTML document parseable by any machine, a set of standard UTF encoding that enables us to write in Japanese —私が日本語にこのテキストを今書いているように— and a number of things which, in theory and practice, have been useful and successful for the projects that are most used nowadays, e.g. Google.

What my colleagues and I plan to do is set up a free translation platform for Tractis. Therefore, any human can participate and maintain it. But the power of thousands will surely standardize the application towards a more popular language and closer to human beings. Interfaces that talk our language and not in a strict, manual, cold-as-ice Spanish. This will help to create sharp differences in grammatical use depending on the country. Depending exclusively on the work of the community of users and professional translators, we expect to reach an intermediate point by providing: the Spanish that is talked in Argentina and Chile, distinguishing it completely from the idioms and words normally used in Spain; UK English that is completely different from US English; and so forth.

Considering all those issues is not an easy task but we are working on it; it is a task that is providing some smiles for us; and, especially because of my hobby of strange languages, I hope that one day the application will be translated into Klingon, as Google does.

Qapla’

By Diego Lafuente
Saved in: Tractis | No comments » | 24 June 2006