> Hey Dilwyn > > Whats suddenly wrong with Welsh, I see even MS Office have a Welsh Edition, > must be all the complaining you've done over the years. > > mike And there's me thinking I was banging my "pen" (head) against the "mur" (wall) all these "blynyddoedd" (years).
I'd meant to mention that. I think it started when companies who work through the medium of Welsh (broadcasters, Welsh music companies, book publishers, public bodies and so on) realised M$ was willing to provide additional language support. Welsh spell checkers etc have been available for a while. I probably won't go for these as my wife is not a fluent Welsh speaker like me, although I do create documents and so on in Welsh from time to time. It's good to know they're there and that there is a demand for them. If ever I work for a company which needs Welsh computers, I'll know the facility is available. I saw some of the screens from Welsh Windows and like other language versions I've seen, some of the translations are a bit of a compromise - if a term is a very long word in one language and it won't fit an icon or small menu, you use an abbreviation or a near equivalent which doesn't always mean the same thing in all contexts. A simple example, as an exercise, I patched a level 1 config a few years ago to work via Welsh. The English abbreviations for Yes and No are Y and N obviously. In Welsh, they are Ie and Na so in addition to patching to allow for word length (the Welsh for Yes is 2 letters long, not 3) I had to find the keypresses detected (fairly easy in Config IIRC), change those and make sure the patched messages had correct lengths (easy enough where shorter, not so easy where longer sentences). I got it to work, and used it for a while until MenuConfig came along and I never bothered with that. At one stage, when I started publishing pointer driven software with DJC, I accidentally put the Welsh version of Config on some of the disks which proved an interesting experience for a few people. In short, nothing wrong with Welsh until it comes to trying to patch text in programs into Welsh in a binary editor and making the messages the same length, I draw the line at that! In other words, well done M$, it's not a job I'd have liked to do! (Changed a couple of thread names in my replies tonight as I'd started wandering off topic a bit). Dilwyn Jones _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
