Shoutbox

As Cookie said, it is indeed not up to me to decide who works in/with which translation team. One should look at that teams leader(s) for that.

That said we will never stop anyone from making, and posting, an unofficial translation. The translation can always be posted in this section (translation) of the forum. After all we can never have every language variation (or fun translation if any) in the installer anyway.

Cookie, I see your point. The thing is that we've been living very far from Portugal for over 500 year, and our cultural development took very distinct paths. I understand that it was easier for German, French, Dutch, etc to unify the language because you, speakers, were still living close to each other, in touch as (almost) one single population, with small variants.

For Portuguese and Spanish (and that is what Chrono was saying), it's not that easy. We have different vocabs, and they are very well established. For a few examples, in the order: EN - PT - BR
File - Ficheiro - Arquivo
About - Acerca - Sobre
Nickname - Alcunha - Apelido
I am doing [whatever] - Estou a fazer [whatever] - Estou fazendo [whatever] > orthography is unified, but constructions are still different.
Log - Registo - Registro > words like this are still different, and people may think they are misspelled.

And one very noticeable, in Portugal, people prefer to talk on the 2nd person, when speaking directly to someone else. Here in Brazil, we have our very characteristic to speak in the 3rd person instead of 2nd. It can sound weird, but it's been like this for generations.

The great difference is this lexical variance, it's cultural. The orthography is the least important. Anyone can understand both "seleccionar" and "selecionar", "activar" and "ativar", "seqüência" and "sequência". When we talk about etymology, however, it's harder to understand each other. You need to re-learn many words.
I mean, you don't need to study 2 hours a day to learn it. Of course not. But their words are not part of our vocab, as much as our word don't belong to theirs.
In the end, even though we have the agreement, and we can easily understand each other, the linguistic difference will still sound strange to either sides.

Perhaps in the future this things can change and there will be a really unified language. However, it doesn't happen today, and will take a while until it does.
IMHO, I like my language the way I speak, and I don't want it to be changed by force. It's something that has to be molded thru time, as people change, as the world evolutes. People are trying to bring them back together, as one single language, when the natural path may be to get further and further.

Just my little bits:

I believe an "unification" is possible, but it would require a lot of communitation between us from Brazil and them from Portugal, as we'd have to know when we have used words only some of us are used to, and when we have used actually international words. And even if complete unification ends up being impossible, it sure would be better to at least try to balance the localizations.

The current official Portuguese translation still uses the old ortography. It's not actually wrong yet, since all Portuguese-speaking countries recognized both ortographies, but it will be wrong later this year for us in Brazil, and in 2014 for the folks in Portugal, they're having a longer transition period.

IMHO, you should remind the Portuguese translation team of that, it wouldn't be of any good to have wrong spellings on the country with most users for that language (I suppose, since our internet population is bigger than Portugal's, and our people seem to love Messenger no matter what, Plus! being quite popular too).

As for initiative, Chancer is busy (which is why I'm keeping up his work with Destroyzer, as he mentioned above), but we'd love to help make the setup Portuguese language more neutral, I believe it'd be good for both sides.

Update:

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Originally posted by Axtinguisher
Hi Possetti, we do have already a Portuguese language in Messenger Plus! Although not specifically from Brazil but the international form of it.

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Oh no, it uses the Portuguese Portuguese

quote:

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Originally posted by Chancer
Whether they are "official" or not, it's not up to me. If Yuna decide to have both translations, it's going to be amazing to the community. Since you are now working as a company, I believe the translators might have sort of a payment (or they should, I think), therefore it may not be interesting for you.

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they are paying WAY less than before, for the record An insignificant ammount in fact

quote:

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
tbh, that's not up to Sunshine. She can't force someone to join a/another team.

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lol, i know. i meant that she can try "up to sunshine" as in "she's in charge of the translation temas" and such

quote:

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Originally posted by Sunshine

As Cookie said, it is indeed not up to me to decide who works in/with which translation team. One should look at that teams leader(s) for that.

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you could propose it to them, formally
Or point them to this thread so they can explain their point of view if they dont want to.

quote:

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Originally posted by Chrono

quote:

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Originally posted by Chancer
Whether they are "official" or not, it's not up to me. If Yuna decide to have both translations, it's going to be amazing to the community. Since you are now working as a company, I believe the translators might have sort of a payment (or they should, I think), therefore it may not be interesting for you.

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they are paying WAY less than before, for the record An insignificant ammount in fact

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You still do not know what we are going to pay, the website translation pay is one thing, there is still more to come (soon). So do not judge/draw conclusions just yet! Whether the plans also behold pay for program translations, which currently is not payed and never has been (besides the occasional t-shirt/gift), remains to be seen.  Anyway I don't think this is something that should be discussed in public, translations should still be done for the love of the progam, not for the money! It was never intended that way and should not become so either (quality over...you know what I mean).

quote:

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you could propose it to them, formally
Or point them to this thread so they can explain their point of view if they dont want to.

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No formal proposal from me, it is up to them. I did take your other suggestion and informally informed them about this discussion.

quote:

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Originally posted by Sunshine

quote:

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Originally posted by Chrono
Or point them to this thread so they can explain their point of view if they dont want to.

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No formal proposal from me, it is up to them. I did take your other suggestion and informally informed them about this discussion.

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Thank you

Portuguese is very different from spanish or english when it comes to "understanding each other no matter the country".

Latin American spanish and European Spanish has slight differences in accent and word choice, which is normal, but they can understand each other without any problems.

The same goes for American English and European English. The accent difference is even bigger than in spanish languages, but people from the UK can watch a cartoon dubbed in american english, and americans can play watch a movie with european english audio and they don't find it weird.

In Brazil, we jus't can't play or watch something in european portuguese because it sounds too weird and we can't understand it very well. Sometimes it even sounds funny to our ears. We also don't listen to european portuguese songs, we don't watch Portuguese movies, we don't read books translated to european portuguese and we don't play games in european portuguese translations... But the language still share the same name.

On the other hand, Portugal is more used to Brazilian Portuguese. They listen to our songs, they watch our novelas (soap operas) and TV shows. I also heard that they didn't have a dubbing studio untill the 90's, so all the tv shows and cartoon were in brazilian portuguese.

This might sounds a little xenofobic from me, but the thing is: European Portuguese is VERY weird for Brazilians, we are not used to it, its a bit hard to understand it perfectly when we read or listen to it, specially when it comes to technologic and computer therms.

I think MSGPLUS doesn't come with Brazilian Portuguese language as an option because the person who decides that is not aware of those facts, or maybe he just don't care, I don't know.

Brazil is one of the countries who uses MSN MESSENGER the most, much more than portugal, but MSGPLUS has no native support for our language.

I'm not saying that European Portuguese shouldn't be on the list, I'm saying that BOTH version of the languages should come with MSGPLUS.

Sorry about my english.