Mama 'n Bama
16 Oct, 07
Google Summer of Code 2007
24 Apr, 07
I will be participating in this year’s Summer of Code, working on WordPress internationalization. You can read my full proposal online. Of over 6,000 applications, about 900 were accepted. WordPress could only accept 10 out of about 90 applications. It’s bound to be an interesting summer with working on WordPress and Habari at the same time, plus $work, photography, and ‘real’ life.
The frenzy officially starts on May 28th, but I’ll likely start working on things earlier — as soon as I have some time at $work, that is — since the task is not quite as easy as it might appear. A big part of the trouble stems from the fact that WordPress uses third-party components which are maintained by their respective project groups, and, in the case of TinyMCE, aren’t even PHP, but JavaScript. The other problem is translating basically static texts like the README file, but also plugin and theme descriptions. Obviously, we can’t expect every plugin and theme author to speak several languages, and since metadata is stored in a plaintext blob, we can’t use gettext or similar tools (aside from the fact that we can hardly ship a giant gettext mo containing all translations for all known plugins).
And I haven’t even begun to talk about cultural localization…
General, Web, WordPress, Code, Language, Google, Internationalization, localization, i18n and l10n
Pronouncing Habari
10 Jan, 07
Since the question has been raised how to pronounce Habari:
In X-SAMPA, it would be transcribed as
- [hA”b_<A:ri]
with stress on the second to last syllable (“ba”), and
- h, as in ‘house’
- A, as in ‘father’, but short
- b_<, like a normal b, but suck the air IN (this sound does not exist in any Western language I know)
- A:, as in ‘father’ again, but slightly longer than before (due to the primary stress)
- r, as in Spanish ‘claro’ or Finnish ‘perkele’ (an alveolar trill)
- i, as in ‘be’
My (admittedly rather bad) rendering is here:
[audio:http://moeffju.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/habari.mp3]
If you’re a native speaker of Swahili, please make a recording and send it to me!
Things to ponder: "Undo"
24 Dec, 06
English has a short, simple word: “undo”.
The equivalent in German is “Rückgängig machen” or “Ungeschehen machen”, and I can’t really think of anything shorter than that.
What does that say about the cultures?
41. StuTS in Bielefeld
05 Dec, 06
Die nächste Studentische Tagung Sprachwissenschaft (XLI. StuTS)
findet vom 16.05.-20.05. 2007 in Bielefeld statt.
Wer’s glaubt.
Word of the Year 2006 will be "pwnage"
28 Nov, 06
Merriam-Webster’s top ten “Words of the Year” 2006 will be determined by an online poll. What could possibly go wrong?
I, for one, welcome our new l33tsp34k pwnage w0rd of the year overlordz.