Phorum: not in $LANGUAGE
As needed for a customer, we decided to set up a phorum engine on its website. It's a well-known forum engine, used in a lot of places.
When I set it up, I've found localised filed for French for the public interface. Great! But for the admin interface, nothing. Browsing the code... okay. The strings are well localised for the public messages, but the admin is absolutely not build up for that: the messages are spread out everywhere in the source code, it's impossible to translate them all correctly.
Ok, let's dive in the phorum dev site... oh! Trac! What about adding a new ticket? The answer was really fast: wontfix.
They may have their reasons for that, but I'm really disappointed. May I quote our SABDFL? :
And I think he's absolutely right. Managing phorum is not an easy task: there are loads of options, sometimes hard to decypher, even for someone who is fluent english. And if the dev team don't make it easier for non-english speaking, they're going to shoot themselves in the foot."Well I think we all have a right to use tools in our own language. It's raisonnable for us to prefer tools in our ... in our language."
The big strength of FLOSS is that collaborative work can allow someone to make one tool more accessible to the others ; and translation is a key feature for this.
I'm calling any non-english speaking person (and even english-speakers) to lobby the phorum dev team, along with other FLOSS dev teams to include translation of their software in their plans.
The world will be a better place when it'll speak my tongue.
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