Came across this interesting article that talks about Mozilla’s attempt to translate its browser into as many minority languages as possible: Cookies, caches and cows.
It’s really interesting to see how different IT terms get translated. For example:
Ibrahima Sarr, a Senegalese coder, led the translation of Firefox into Fulah, which is spoken by 20m people from Senegal to Nigeria. “Crash” became hookii (a cow falling over but not dying); “timeout” became a honaama (your fish has got away). “Aspect ratio” became jeendondiral, a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is wrongly woven. In Malawi’s Chichewa language, which has 10m speakers, “cached pages” became mfutso wa tsamba, or bits of leftover food. The windowless houses of the 440,000 speakers of Zapotec, a family of indigenous languages in Mexico, meant that computer “windows” became “eyes”.
Might just have to take the plunge and update my Firefox to Cymraeg. Hope it includes some equally creative translations! For anyone else who’s interested, here’s the link to the Cartref Project Mozilla.
