KiCad ya es una gran herramienta para la captura esquemática y el diseño de PCB, pero el software sólo funciona si es posible utilizarlo. Para los mil millones de personas que no hablan inglés, esto significa que el idioma es la barrera más grande al momento de utilizar el mejor software para desarrollo de hardware. En los últimos meses, [ElektroQuark] ha estado liderando esfuerzos de localización al español de KiCad y estos se encuentran finalmente completados. También ha iniciado un foro de KiCad en idioma español para llevar el desarrollo de software hacia uno de los idiomas más hablado del planeta.
Mientras que ha habido otros intentos por localizar KiCad a otros idiomas, la mayoría de estos proyectos se encuentran incompletos. En una actualización de KiCad hace algunos meses, la localización al español ya contaba con algunas cadenas ya traducidas, pero no demasiadas. Los esfuerzos de [ElektroQuark] han acercado KiCad a millones de hablantes nativos de español, no solo algunos de sus menús.
El español es la segunda lengua más hablada del planeta, mientras que el inglés es la tercera. Teniendo en cuenta solamente este hecho, parece absurdo que casi todas las herramientas de software para capturas esquemáticas y diseño de PCB sean localizados sólo al chino o al inglés. Los esfuerzos de [ElektroQuark] por localizar KiCad al español son un gran avance para un ya impresionante software.
Que?
That’s all I remember from Spanish class.
Ah yes! now I can keep my spanish fresh while still reading something technical. MORE PLEASE!
Actually, it would be great if you had a staff writer that could rewrite articles in Spanish (none of that broken Spanish babble fish stuff), so the reader could”flip a switch” and read HaD in Spanish mode with realistic technical writing.
Hell, I would pay for this service. It’s so hard to get good technical modern technical content in Spanish.
Sorry for accidental report of your comment.
I had Technical English at school (I’m from Argentina) and would love to do so…even more for HaD!
Hand me a babelfish.
You’re in luck, there are 42 left in stock.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-B9cts1Pc4Tc/T8YbL3C76YI/AAAAAAAAAmI/US0ZOmjQLfw/s1600/bumble-bee-man-is-happy.gif
Por último, mi propio PCB
Do not translate technical software. It prevents you from googling sequences of menu and you can’t google exact error message.
Wouldn’t it be up to the end user to decide which available UI language they want to use?
Yes, it would be, and the clueless newcomers will choose their native language anyway if it is available. First problem with UI is the moment they hit the wall. Guess how I know that.
This is especially problematic with open source project under active development. KiCad GUI changed significantly past last two years thanks to CERN contributions – for better for all I know. Yet a lot of courses and tutorials still refer to older versions, and because they were made by volunteers in their free time it wont change too quick. Even if not 100% accurate, they are still usable – with english versions of kicad, but if user happens to use his native translation then it’s hello problems from the start, and in the end programmers and EEs should know english anyway.
English is currently the third most popular language in the world. Its peak, as the primary language, was around the middle of the 20th century, at about 9% and it has been declining ever since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
English isn’t on top as native language, but I’m quite sure that if you count 1st,2nd or 3rd language English is still the language that most people can use
@fonz
It is number 2 on that list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
1030 million Mandarin Chinese
840 million English
490 million Arabic
490 million Spanish
380 million Modern Standard Hindi
English is the most international language aka most widely spoken language and in that way most “spoken” language. There aren’t that many non chinese people speaking chinese around the world and 99,9% of chinese people are in china or atleast very near proximity of china. Same goes for any other language. Go to any country and you will most likely find someone speaking english. Try the same with chinese.
Personally i always choose english as the language on programs that i use, but it is harder for my mother since she does not speak english, so her programs are in the native language as much as possible. I then have to try to translate all my instructions for her, so sometimes i need to ask her to read out the menu options, because the translations are not always that good or they use synonyms.
So, sure the programs can/should have translations, but if you can speak english at all, use the english version. That way you’ll learn english and, as mentioned, can find tutorials/help easier.
But who is speaking Mandarin outside of China and Taiwan? Same of Hindi outside of India.
considering world wide distribution English and Spanish are the 2 first ones. It comes with no surprise considering history of British empire and Spanish conquistador.
Would you say the same if the software UI were Chinese or Hungary only? Not everyone feels comfortable enough (or at all) with English to use the software.
Yes. One of the problems of a translated program is that supporting documentation is hard to come by and it’s often very poor quality. Native support is often on the level of “click this, click that” because nobody else knows how to use the program either – people are just going through the motions.
Often terms don’t translate at all, or the translator did a very poor job, which destroys usability. You basically have to google the english version of the software to figure out what something means because the native version makes absolutely no sense.
The problem is that english has developed a computer jargon that simply does not exist in other languages, or what does exist is hamfisted and not commonly known. There are concepts like “cache”, “swap”, “purge”, etc. that simply do not translate, and when you use the closest equivalent it becomes meaningless and confusing.
I don’t think that software is a unique field where user interfaces can’t be translated. Every field has his own jargon, some terms are imported, most are translated, no problem at all. Meanwhile nobody is surprised when my German washing machine or my Korean television have the user interface and manuals in Spanish, not German or Korean language. If KiCad were a Chinese software, sure everyone would be happy with a translation to his own language, who needs to know a foreigner language to route a PCB.
Even appliances have the problem. They restort to using no language, but symbols. The problem there is that the user interface becomes incomprehensible without reading the manual to tell you that something like three teardrops symbol means double rinse after washing.
I live in a house with communal washing room and loads of immigrants and exchange students. The washing room has international washer-dryers that use jog wheel controls and LCD screens instead of buttons because of the symbol-interpreting problem. The options and settings can be read from the screen in proper language.
The problem is that the machines have to be set to english even when english isn’t the native language, because everyone understands english, because if you don’t then people won’t even know how to choose the appropriate language using the interface, because the word for “language” differs between languages and if someone changes the language then everything turns to gibberish and you the user won’t even know which menu/option you’re in and what state the machine is reporting. The worst case is if someone chooses a cyrillic or other strange script, because that makes the machine basically unusable until someone resets it.
If the machine happens to be in the default state, then turning the jog wheel one click counterclockwise and then pushing it will reveal the language menu, but if it is not then turning and pushing the wheel can do anything. Furthermore, the machine says what it is doing, like “cooling down, wait a moment”, or “drying done” and if you can’t understand the language then it’s difficult to know what state the machine is in. If you fiddle with it while the program is still running, which it may be even if the machine appears to be doing nothing, it’s not in the default state and can again do something random like cancel the running program or re-start.
Not sure why I can’t reply to Dax, so replying here…
Those washing machines seem badly designed then. The language option should NOT be a menu item. It should have its own dedicated button.
For example, in NZ we have pay-phones which have a dedicated language key with a flag icon on it. Pressing it makes the phone cycle through the available languages. Makes sense to me, anyway.
The washing machine could easily have such a button, and pressing that would change language and not interrupt anything else.
Spanish is my original language, and I keep all my software (including the phone’s) in english just for this reason. Other reason is the often abismal quality of the translations.
I’m guilty of bad translations. I have a couple crappy android apps, and I basically wrote a script to use google translate to make a resource file for every language android supports. While I can only image the horror, I got lots of downloads in other countries.
While I’m usually not a fan of ‘Error Codes’, this is a good use case. Typically if you have all the error messages in a resource file, such that they can easily be translated, they will already each have a hard name/code that should be displayed along with error text.
Cuidado! Piso mojado! That’s about all the Spanish I know. But Google Translate is my friend.
Haces bien, Translate ayuda mucho, pero en el caso particular del español, la forma en la que lo traduce es bastante errónea.
Piso mojados are my favorite drink!
Yet again 4 years of high school Spanish pay off. I think it’s great to have translated tools. Documentation and errors can be made more easily searchable if they add ID numbers or designations – this would allow non-English users to find and translate forum posts and articles if the answers they need aren’t available in their native language.
“Localizar”, I think it’s correct to use it here, but if feels so weird when I read it.
This entry blow my mind, I though at first that feedly messed up.
Despite being Spanish, I prefer all in English. It helps a lot when you need documentation. I had many friends clueless as they only search in Spanish due to lazyness.
Wait.
Is this in response to a comment made in the job enlistment post?
Likely.
I’d be not at all surprised if this was Benchoff troll baiting.
Considering I wrote this post a day before the job post…… Cool I can travel in time.
Hola,
Gran parte de la documentación oficial está también traducida al español (aunque aún es necesario depurar y añadir imagenes con el interfaz en Español)
http://kicad-pcb.org/help/documentation/
Así que creo que KiCad está en un punto magnífico para los usuarios de habla hispana que no dominen el Inglés.
It is a great new. Today the english is the most important language for technology, but for non-english speaking people, the software translations are the best way to ensure the spread of knowledge.
Enhorabuena por el artículo, estoy muy orgulloso de que también se tome en cuenta el idioma español. Una nación como E.E.U.U. es grande no sólo por la diversidad cultural sino también por la lingüística.
Aha, yo se que hay muchas personas en los E.E.U.U. quienes tienen mucho oposición a los habladores del Espanol.
Que linda sorpresa leer HackADay en español!! I agree with one of the top comments. UI I don’t care, but errors should remain untranslated just to find something in google. Happen to me a lot in command line. Try this one:
$ python3.6
bash: python3.6: no se encontró la orden
I submitted “no se encontró la orden” to google for french translation and it gives: “l’ordre n’a pas été trouvé”
Rather weird translation.
Mysimsiže takovydleto blbovinkyby senemě lydělat. Dohá jekdo tomáč Íst?
Google translate don’t know that language.
Actually it does, but it is written mangled so that it doesn’t recognise the language.
This one is Czech with intentionally misplaced spaces ;) “I think that one should not do these childish jokes. Who is supposed to read that?”
As an English speaking user, I would like to apologies too all the people who do not speak English as their first language and wish to use software and write about they projects in their language. Not all English English speakers are so closed minded. I have tools that allow me to read what your have written so please, ignore the knuckle draggers as I want to learn from you. I wish to explore the world beyond the borders of my country.
Thank you for your valued contribution. :)
English is not my mother tongue, but it is the language of aviation where I spent my working life. Having a common language internationally was a huge advantage for those of us in the industry and I see no need for native Anglophones to apologise for this.
+1
Tools like translators are not perfect and you don’t need to understand every word to know what a sentence means.
Once you got your head around it your work gets far easier becouse of more people writing about their solutions to problems in a language you can understand. English as a general technical language is like the metric system.
Except the metric system hasn’t “borrowed” from other systems becoming a mass of rules and exceptions.
Please, tell me, what else should I feel guilty for? Get out of here with your privilege checking crap…
As a person who visits English language sites I like those to be in the English language.
If I want another language I go to a site that is in that language.
Too simple?
P.S. I do however accept some small grammatical or spelling mistakes from non native English speaking contributors and editors :)
Coman mamey Kicad!
Great thing to start breaking the barrier for Spanish speaking people
And I took Japanese in high school.
If I’m ever stuck in Japan, I’ll be the guy asking everyone, “Who is the Bank?”
I bought netbook from Japan and it came with Japanese Windows Vista. So I’ll be asking “OK Cancel.” And it is my only Windows and in daily use.
And it is great way to excuse people not to borrow computer or help with their computer problems when your UI is totally non-understandable.
When I was doing onsite computer/peripheral/network maintenance I and one client business that bought an entire office block. They had about 250 staff and not one of them (as far as I know) spoke English. All the computers had Japanese *only* versions of Windows.
I could nut the OS through as everything is still in the same place even though the text was in Japanese but just working out what the actual problem is from the customer was the biggest challenge. Often they seemed even more frustrated than I lol.
I got used to the visual aspect of the OS rather than than the text. Later I did some phone support and my workmates would laugh. I only did phone support when all the other support staff were busy so I never had a computer in front of me (they were all i use). I used a cigarette packet as if it were a mouse to go through the motions and from my experience with the foreign language OS, I could say to the customer things like “Click file and select the third option down as I knew exactly where everything has. It used to baffle some staff at my office but it always lifted morale a bit as phone support is so so boring.
I don’t know how Brian translate/write this article to/in spanish but it is the perfect example of how technical translation goes wrong. Even when is translated by native speakers.
I mean, almost the whole article is perfectly written/translated but the use of the word “Localización” feels like scratching a blackboard… and he use it five times (localización, localizar, localizados). He should have used the term “Regionalización”.
Anyway, It was great to see an article written in spanish in here.
—
No sé como Brian tradujo/escribió este artículo a/en español pero es el perfecto ejemplo de como traducciones técnicas salen mal. Aún cuando sean traducidas por “hablantes nativos” (he ahí otro término que se siente raro al traducirlo, ¿no?).
Quiero decir, casi todo el artículo está perfectamente escrito/traducido pero el uso de la palabra “Localización” se siente como al arañar un pizarrón… y él lo usa cinco veces (localización, localizar, localizados). Debió haber usado el termino “Regionalización”.
De cualquier forma, fue grandioso ver un artículo escrito en español aquí.
Yo cuero taco bell?
All your bass are belong to us? (hey, don’t judge, we’re a pescatarian bunch!)
Mmm… I could really go for a batch of fried smallies.
something something La Biblioteca something something learn english like the rest of us you savage
Although I prefer running tech software in english where possible (for support, and community) this is great news.
When you are learning a new software you hit a wall, and the language turns into another barrier. And for youngsters who are still learning english this is very frustrating.
Also pretty clever to write this entry in Spanish. As a spaniard i can certify it makes sense and it’s properly written :) Felicidades.
La traducción es terrible… parece traducido palabra por palabra del Inglés… las palabras están bien escritas… pero nada más.
That’s an awful translation, I’d say that it was translated word-by-word instead of being written in SPanish from the start.
Excelente una muy buena oportunidad para que la comunidad crezca, viva el español
I’m a native English speaker/writer, with just a smattering of Espanol, Mandarin, and Arabic.
I think Spanish is a great second language for the main reason that vowels and constanents (sp?) pretty much have only one way to pronounce them. I.e. No “Long A’s, silent E’s, C’s that sound like S’s…” which make learning English difficult to learn because of some many special cases. They do have to work on that “Silent H” though… B^)
For that matter, German is even more regular than Spanish. Consonants do not change how they are spoken like in Castellano. And C’ should sound like Z’s, that is what the Spaniards do.
The problem is you have many pronunciations depending on the country… the Spaniards do not seem to make a difference between b and v, but we Argentinians do (what I think is correct). We do not make any difference between C’s, S’s and Z’s and the Spaniards do (what I think is correct). Y’s and Ll’s sound the same but according to what I learned at school they shouldn’t…
And the language is called Castellano, not Spanish, at least for me.
This is why technical trades use normalized language. It’s also why we still hear Latin in the sciences, as it was one of the first forms of language normalization in technical trades.
Hi,
Someone messed up and put me on the Spanish version of the email list. Please do not send me anymore Spanish emails.
Sincerely,
Michael R. Taylor
From: Hackaday Reply-To: Hackaday Date: Friday, February 12, 2016 at 12:00 AM To: Michael Taylor Subject: [New post] KiCad Traducido al Español
WordPress.com Brian Benchoff posted: “KiCad ya es una gran herramienta para la captura esquemática y el diseño de PCB, pero el software sólo funciona si es posible utilizarlo. Para los mil millones de personas que no hablan inglés, esto significa que el idioma es la barrera más grande al mome”
How do I get off the Spanish version of the email list?
Damn, should’ve pressed 2 for English.
I think its about kicad in spanish, and thats fine. But PLEASE Hackaday, if you are gonna do this more, add a flag or 3 letter word to descibe the language (to warn people) that some articles are unreadeble for some people.
No hating on the spanish or whatever, I love to see more support for more languages. But dont just trow articles in another language on the blog. I have enough Rusian, SPanish, Turkish, Chinese forums to translate and make any sense out to discover the same people with the same trouble instead of a solution to a problem i search for.
This was probably a one off a kind one, fine. But if you plan on doing it more offten, ADD a filter, a “translate” button or whatever. Im also alott on mobile, so tab switching isnt that easy as on pc.
Throwing in my two cents. I learned English first, then German (to speak with my family over in West Germany [at the time]). I took ONE year of Spanish, and was able to retain all that I had learned. It is good to have a language to fall back on. I was asked, by a fellow HAM where I got my start in electronics. Radio Shack was my first for the project kits, but my first digital trainer was from Germany. We all can read the schematics, but the words may be different, along with the way we look at resistors and capacitors (Widerstand und Condensator for my German friends). It would be good practice to be the “Wein Bridge of Hackers”…we should meet in the middle and have a general understanding of how things work, auf Deutsch, y Espanol, and English. I wonder if there is a group of tinkerers out there that can speak AND understand 2…3..4..5 languages. If so, count me in, because I wish to learn and improve in understanding those around us. 73, KC8KVA