Opera Mini translated into over 50 languages; 15 more to come later this month
Published November 7th, 2007 4:13 PM EST By Daniel GoldmanThe newly released Opera Mini 4 has been translated into over 50 languages, with an additional 15 to come later this month.
This is a big step for us, as we move toward bringing Opera Mini and more importantly the Web to developing nations, where the mobile Web is for many the only option. Many people in these developing countries don’t have the luxury of a PC, let alone networked Internet connectivity. A mobile phone with internet access, on the other hand, is a more affordable option.
According to internal Opera Mini usage statistics, Opera Mini is very popular in countries with low PC penetration but high mobile phone penetration, such as South Africa and Bangladesh.
Here are the languages that we’ve already translated:
Afrikaans, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese/cn, Chinese/tw, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, English/GB, Estonian, Finnish, French, French/CA, Frisian, Georgian, German, Greek, Modern (1453- ), Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian/nb, Norwegian/nn, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese/BR, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish/ES, Spanish/LA, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
Later this month we hope to have Opera Mini translated to these additional 15 languages:
Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bosnian, Chinese/hk, Farsi (Persian), Gallegan, Hausa, Igbo, Kazakh, Sesotho, Swahili, Xhosa, Yoruba, and Zulu.
Opera is truly on a mission to bring the Web everywhere.
using
I highly doubt that French/CA can be considered different from French. Actually there is no difference except, maybe, the browser language ID that sends requests to servers like google to receive the canadian Google frontpage instead of the french one. (fr-ca instead of fr)
But if you count that, you would also have to count English/CA, English/AU as being different languages. (en-ca versus en)
My point is, French is French. My guess is that French/CA was added in this list to actually get to 50 languages to please the marketing department.
using
Fr-Ca is not the same fr.
The translation is different.
using
Banners in 50 languages for bloggers? Well… I’ll make one in Portuguese…
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Trent: I don’t see why they would be different, it’s the same language. Unless there are swear words in the language file, as we use different swears on this side of the atlantic… Hum…
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First try (not very good) in portuguese, for Portugal and Brazil.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v197/abaixodecao/2007/opera-mini-everywhere_pt-pt-br.jpg
Please, don’t hotlink…
using
Luchio, I’m not sure about the differences between those languages; there are apparently some differences which is why translation team went through the hassle of separating them.
Oh, and btw, I got this list from the Opera Mini team — marketing was not involved in this.
using
As I’m french, I can tell you that there are sometimes big differences between french and canadian.
For instance, I’ve heard once in the opera forum that the fr-ca translation was better than the fr one, so i tried, and few seconds later I was back to the fr one.
Canadians are nowadays known for their adaptation of the english word to french, as french prefers to adopt the english originals words. (mostly in the technology, example: the word “chat” is not translated in french but canadians prefer to say “clavardage”, a word mixing the meaning of “keyboard” and “chat”)
using
Gosh, Luchio, Opera cheated on purpose by adding French twice! The exact same French! Shame on them! Only to get one more language. Boo!
using
Who made the Estonian translation?
using
Thank you for belarusian language version
using
As the actual translator for French Canadian version of Opera, I wanted to make my point in this debate about having two French language to reach the 50 languages number. All French Canadian know that the French language (written and spoken) in France and in Canada are different. French language evolved differently on the other of the Atlantic. We are much less prone to use English words as-is, especially when there is a proper word in French that already exist. in france, they are talking about “shopping”, while here we talk about “magasinage”. In France, they leave their car in a “parking”, while we leave ours in a “stationnement”. Over the years, there were words that were created for technological vocabulary, instead of using the English words as-is. “Clavardage” is one of those, instead of just using “chat”. However, there are other words that have been created in Quebec that make no sense to me, like “gaminet” for a T-Shirt, or “vermine” for a bug (in the cmoputer sense of the word).
In Canada, French is a minority language, and we are trying to defend it and to keep it as French as possible, instead of getting too influenced by English that is all around us (really!). Our French language is closely tied to our culture and identity. Some politicians even made laws around this (google for “loi 101″ and “Quebec”). Some were taking this a bit too far, in my opinion, but this does not change the fact that we have a different French than France. I will not say that it is better or worse, simply different. Ask other European countries who also use French (Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium), and they will tell you. Just inside the Quebec province, there are variations on the spoken French between Montreal, Lac Saint-Jean and Abitibi. And this is normal.
It would have been very easy just to use French from France and duplicate it. But having gone over the entire language source files myself, I can say there were/are several differences that needed to be covered. If you want to voice your opinion, that’s fine ! if you would like to see changes in the translation I provided, please let me know. I’m open for discussions and even debates about wording. We could have fun for days just with that.
If you want to contact me, please do so by email: jf@messier.ca
Merci.
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Jean, thanks for clearing things up.
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Interesting read Jean-Francois Messier. I’m not particular good in French my self [even though I lived in Geneva for 1.5years] so would probably not have noticed the difference, but one thing is for sure, French Canadian doesn’t really sound like the French I am used to But somehow easier to understand non the less.
- ØØ -
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That’ll teach Luchio to belittle other people’s language…
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there’s a bit disappointment for the bahasa indonesia version from members of my group. There’s some weird translation i must say. I always prefer international/english version in softwares though :p
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philry4n, can you send me the link to the forum post.
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Sorry for the late reply…
@pleh
I belittle’ing my own language, thank you.
@Jean-François
I am totally aware that there are some differences in some choice of words in some contexts, but an international French language translation would have done the trick IMHO. Instead of choosing Shopping vs Magasinage, a more neutral Commerces could have been used.
I was a little shocked to see québécois (aka french-canadian) in the list since the quantity of software available in fr-ca is close to nil. So why would Opera be in fr-ca? I’m sure that with more neutral choices, there could have been a compromise.
using
I agree, there are very few software in FR-CA, as we usually can live with the regular one. However, the fact that Opera wants to take the extra steps to cover our version of French simply means that they pay attention to us, instead of simply having the generic French translation. And it is sometime very hard to be neutral in the vocabulary used. For myself, I simply refused to read books in French for a long time, as they were for France French, and I just did not like the way it was written. I was simply reading the English books.
We have the same issue with movies that are dubbed in French. Most of them, including cartoons, have a strong accent from France, and there are some words that my wife asks me what they are, because they are very specific to France. In the movie/TV industry, there was a powerful lobby to have all translations done in France, not in Quebec. Now that I’m fluent in English, I’ll rather watch a movie in the original English, rather than watching the French dubbing and always feeling as I’m sitting in Paris at a café.
Opera realized that in Quebec, we are trying to have (and retain) our identity, as speaking French, while remaining different from France. I wish there would be more software companies spending more time in localized versions.
Bonne journée !
JF
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@Jean-François
I still feel like it’s overkill, because formal, written French does not differ much when you cross the ocean, but I understand your point. Care to send me the localization files? I would definitely be curious to see the diffs. My e-mail is the user account luch3 from the Hotmail commercial provider.
“Ammène ton costard, on va lui pèter la tronche à ce mec! Ça va lui foutre les glands!”