Things I could perhaps give talks on at GUADEC

[marnanel]

"From English to English: an introduction to dialectal translation"

• overview of non-US English dialects: en-GB (and why it's not en-UK), en-CA, en-AU, others
• is this necessary or important?  (Yes.)
• How it's done (at an automated level); Abigail's script
• How it's done (at a human level) and why we need to hand-check ("Colourado"; sometimes a check is not a cheque)
• Common dialectal substitutions in software (we can find these out programmatically)
• Controversies about translations: how on earth do we translate trash?  Dialogue box or dialog box?  If we call the eraser a rubber, will people laugh?
• Punctuation differences
• Actual phrasing differences rather than spelling and word substitution
• Dialect versus language (e.g. Scots)
• How many teams in various free software projects are working on each dialect?  GNOME, KDE, Launchpad, Firefox... coordination
• Automated transliteration into non-Latin alphabets for English (you knew I had to get this in somewhere), and why
• How you can help with all this

"The history of window border decorations"

• the concept of reparenting and frame windows
• different ways to express decorations: preset, code, pixmap, vector...
• reasons generalising theming is difficult
• reasons theming buttons is particularly difficult
• timeline of various WMs' ability to do this
• particular cases of how various WMs deal with this, with examples
• how it's played out over the history of Metacity
• which theme formats are most widely used?
• how window border themes relate to other kinds of theme
• the theme artist community as opposed to the WM developer community
• theme formats used across multiple WMs
• CSS themes

I wonder whether anyone would be interested in either of these.  Would you come to hear them if you saw them on the programme?  Would they be of any use?  Perhaps I'll submit both of them and see whether either of them are approved.

Edit: Of course I could also do a talk on writing N900 apps.

Comments

[eeanm.livejournal.com]

My main experience of en-au and en-ca is how it screwed up Amarok *for years* on Launchpad. The status bar would show HTML garbage, so it was some sort of technical issue. (I was also a bit unconvinced at en-au since Australians I talked to didn't really know they even had Australian-English dictionaries.)

Obviously thats not either of the dialect's fault but because of Launchpad and a complete lack of responsibility felt by the people involved (or not) in its "translation." And that KDE lacks these language targets, so it was on Launchpad to do all the work, which resulted in piles of fail.

anyways I'm a KDE guy, so I can't be helpful in picking out your talk topic, but a couple of years later that whole experience still makes me frustrated to think about. Sorry for the vent. :)

[marnanel]

Hey, don't worry about venting, it's nice to get comments :)

I'd be interesting in mentioning that in a "great en-XX screwups of our time" section.

[pne]

I'd be interesting in mentioning that in a "great en-XX screwups of our time" section.

I'd be interested in listening to that. Or indeed a whole talk about en-to-en, er, localisation.