On Thursday 28 April 2005 17:49, Daniel Carrera wrote: > Christian Einfeldt wrote: > > That depends on what century you are in. In later centuries, > > the Klingons were part of the federation. > > What??? Are you sure? In which century was that? Certainly not > in the TNG series.
Let me check on that. I do think that it was shown to be the case during the last series, the Enterprise series, during one of Archer's trips to the distant future. > > > But I guess also I must confess that I don't mind tweaking the > > Klingonists just a bit for their apathy and laziness in not > > wanting to localize OOo for Klingon. There doesn't seem to be > > much honor in that kind of laziness. > > You have to admit that the endeavour was not particularly useful. It was actually a learning experience, at least for me. I thought that the Klingonists would be excited to be able to have an office suite in Klingon, because the Klingonists are always trying to do different things to make Klingon more widely used. Instead, I found that I was seen as an OOo zealot who just showed up on the KLI list one day trumpeting the benefits of OOo, and I think that I made a huge mistake in that regard. I learned that the KLI Klingonists are an intensely scholarly group whose primary interest is sharing their passion for reading, writing, and speaking Klingon. On this OOo list, we sometimes talk about troubles we have bringing newbies into the group. Sometimes we are critical of members of the OOo group who are too harsh on newbies. My experience with the Klingonists is that you really need to lurk a while and learn quite a bit about a group before proposing new initiatives with that group. I think that the KLI Klingonists were just not interested in using OOo; but I also think that I appeared to be too brash, and so I didn't increase the likelihood of adoption with the KLI with my zealotry. However, as time goes by, maybe another Klingonist will hear of OOo, and perhaps Gerry Singleton and I planted a seed with one or two Klingonists who will later take interest in localizing OOo for Klingon. So actually, yes, I do think that endeavor was useful. We have approached a community of linguists who have developed an artificially created language; we've educated them a bit about the existence of OOo; and we've learned that it is best to be proficient speaker of a group who is respected within that group, or to approach such a person in a group, rather than just show up on their doorstep offering what is perceived by them as practically spam sales, even though no money is sought. We have also learned that Paramount has a proprietary interest in some materials associated with Klingon; and that it is best to deal with an organization such as the KLI that has negotiated with Paramount to get permission from Paramount to use its intellectual property or do the negotiating yourself. We also learned a bit about Klingon itself; that it is the only full blown language to emerge out of the Star Trek series; that all the other languages were only language stubs; that Klingon is regarded by Klingonists as being difficult to learn; that Klingon has been translated to major literary works such as some of the works of Shakespeare; that there is a "native" Klingon character set, but very very few Klingonists communicate using that character set, but rather use the basic European alphabet to write Klingon; and that it takes a major sustained effort by dedicated linguists to enhancing Klingon and keeping it alive. We also learned that a localization is a massive project; that it takes dedication and hours of work by highly skilled and educated people; that you need to have someone who can 1) run a web site, like Gerry Singleton did; 2) someone who is sufficiently familiar with computers to be able to determine what word strings need to be translated; 3) that in the case of Klingon, there will be disagreements as to words like "window" [in the context of a computer window, not a window in a house] 4) that similar disagreements will probably exist in most localization projects, so you need to have a good social organization so that people in the group will be able to process these disagreements and come to concensus so as to not cause strife in the group; 5) that you probably need to have someone who can sometimes drop other tasks to attend to issues such as organizing meetings on line, or even better, in person; 6) that it helps to have an actual nation-state of geographically centrally located people who have close regular daily contact with one another [Klingonists are dispersed across the globe]. I personally felt that this last item (lack of a nation-state) was probably the biggest hurdle to localization of Klingon. Klingonists, being Klingonists, are intensely proud of their language and take great pride in the fact that it is actually a real language. However, that pride is not sufficient to overcome the fact that no one uses Klingon to build bridges; or raise families (although I did hear of one family where the kids could speak Klingon); or bury their dead; or raise crops; or raise an army; or discuss their common ancestory or religion. As a result of the lack of these factors, there was not the same sense of national identity that is required to overcome the significant hurdles of localizing a language. In other words, I think that we learned that localization is a really big deal, and those native lang projects which have accomplished it are to be commended for a major accomplishment. Another important thing that we learned is that we have at least tried to contact an language group like this. At least we didn't just sit back and discuss it but not do anything about it. We tried, we failed to achieve our goal of localization, at least in the short term, and so now we wait for contact from a Klingonist who has the skill and respect from within the Klingon community, because without that, you will never achieve a localization of Klingon. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]