User talk:Homunq

Welcome[1]

RE: El bendito "chico"

follow up to User talk:Xavi#El bendito "chico"

Je... justamente estuve sacando estadísticas del uso de algunos términos (ver Translating/Spanish terms) que justamente compara las terminologías por países y le agregue el caso child (ya lo automaticé, con lo cual es muy fácil comparar :) Revisando los resultados, salta a la vista la preferencia por niño. Esto implicaría empezar a migrar de terminología... zut!

Uno de mis 'problemas' con el término niño es su 'ñ'. Por un lado me parece bueno usar esa 'letra exclusiva', pero eso al mismo tiempo crea un problema al momento de escribirlo—he visto muchas formas de escribir palabras con 'ñ' en teclados qwerty: nn, nh, ni, gn, .... Por otro lado, y esto es totalmente personal, el término niño siempre me pareció académico, formal, o algo distante. Siempre me ha parecido que las personas prefieren o usan términos más locales y regionales.

En fin, tendremos que empezar a migrar... voluntarios? :) Cheers, Xavi 13:49, 11 August 2007 (EDT)

PS: As for the gender issue, I mostly agree with the discriminatory connotations, but spanish is not gender neutral—quite the contrary. English is much more flexible at generating and coining neologisms and terms, the academic nature of spanish inhibits that. Also, we must accept the differences and not impose cultural biases on perception (ie: just because the USA is all wound up on a subject doesn't mean the rest of the world has to follow suit). Culture-shock cuts both ways. I think we should strive for neutrality whenever possible, but artificially impossing it just confuses things most of the time: reading text with los/las niñas/os everywhere is the best way to hide the message... Xavi 14:15, 11 August 2007 (EDT)

follow up

Protegidas? No veo ninguna—Special:Protectedpages solo muestra una página realmente protegida y solo para usuarios no-registrados (las otras páginas ahí son por spamming). Con lo cual... voluntarios? :) BTW, usando la búsqueda de chico (de Google limitada al sitio) encontré 95 hits.

Quixotic? No more than trying to de-gender biology ;) As for the RAE... I've always resented and have been against their grip on my language - heck, in Argentina we use the voseo but books don't teach it! Why? My finger points to the RAE (passing through the local academy) and language teachers... So in that sense, my battle is not gender-related but freedom-wise, once we set the language free we can tackle (maybe ;) the softening of the gender issues of the language :) Cheers, --Xavi 16:00, 11 August 2007 (EDT)

About your specific mention, Core principles/lang-es would seem fully niñizado, wouldn't it? And alternating gender? I don't necessarily object to it, but it's not the same as in english with plurals, as the spanish femenine plural is more gender specific than the masculine plural—maybe not in the written form, but most definitely in the meaning.

If by 'protection' you mean the green OLPC ribbon on top, that is just a marker denoting not the 'protection' of the page, but rather a 'watch what you edit here'. IOW, you are free to edit, but double and triple check, as the contents are 'official'. Xavi 16:00, 11 August 2007 (EDT)

follow up

Revert? Hey, I've done plenty of translations, but I'm not the owner :) Most of them were done too fast to consider or pick the exact terms, and many really need a review, so you are more than welcome to tweak them. I did re-tweak some of your changes though, but minor or for gender consistency.

Just for the record, I doubt I'll go the extra-mile to switch gender. After many years (going back to my school days) where I proactively used the los/las as gender encompassing technique, my current approach (in the wiki) is one of "least surprise" of the reader, as my main objective is to make content accessible. But please feel free to do it yourself! :) In the process you may also catch whatever localisms and better wording! After all, this is a wiki :)

BTW, 'enganche' (lousy translation, I know) is used in some places as something that engages, or hooks, your attention. There is no real translation for 'engage' as it's context-sensitive in spanish. Xavi 19:25, 11 August 2007 (EDT)

FAQ discussion?

Is there a convenient time to chat about the FAQ pages this week? --Walter 18:14, 1 January 2008 (EST)

how about today? 3PM Mountain time? Is there a number I can call? --Walter 08:01, 3 January 2008 (EST)

translation template update

Thanks, homunq! Xavi will be pleased to note this when he comes back. --Sj talk 22:13, 26 February 2008 (EST)

¿Dónde en Guatemala?

Interesting to see somebody who is down there working with OLPC and XOs. I was living there on and off from 1996-2000, mostly in Todos Santos (Huehue), learning Spanish and some Mam (more about linguistics than Mam, in truth). Are you looking at any kind of pilots, or just messing with the machine for your own enjoyment? Saludos desde otro gringo-chapín. --@alex 17:10, 29 February 2008 (EST)

I live in Guatemala City now, but I was in between Escuintla and Antigua for two years. I am helping out with some programming for the Peru launch, but I do not have any direct prospects for getting Guate to buy in. Homunq 17:27, 29 February 2008 (EST)

MediaWiki GSoC

Hey, I saw your entry on Summer_of_Code/Ideas about school-level wikis, I love the idea and would very much like to work on this for GSoC 2008. I also have a number of ideas about ways this could be expanded. While it would be great for the students to be able to access/modify Wikipedia I also think there's great potential to use a wiki style system for sharing information within the school itself. For instance, a teacher could create a wiki page for an assignment, something along the lines of "Do something creative with TurtleArt." And then the students could post questions about the assignment, share ideas with each other, and on the due data, add links to their individual TurtleArt Journal entries so that they can view each others projects and give feedback.

If you have a chance, I'd really like to talk with you about this idea Jmschanck 19:48, 20 March 2008 (EDT)

Template:langname-xx

For most languages this is just the name of the language in lowercase, but for some of them, the text you entered is rather different, and seems probably wrong. In particular:

Language	code	{{#language:xx}}	{{langname-xx}}	comments
Arabic	ar	العربية	عربي	transliterated, this is "Wiki H.M.L.T" or "HTML Wiki" (!) - note also that final period after ط renders (incorrectly) at right due to Unicode bidi hairiness
Korean	ko	한국어	한국어	한글 Hangul (alphabet) : Korean language :: "Cyrillic" : "Russian" (there are other names for Korean language, see wiktionary entry for 한국어)
Nepali	ne	नेपाली	नेपाली	has a pipe, text is विकि!नेपाली (! is actually pipe) - only last part displays, but as far as I can tell, विकि is just Nepali for "Wiki"

Is there some reason for these differences? Absent capitalization, or issues with formal vs. common names, is there any reason not to have just {{#language:xx}} in Template:langname-xx for Japanese/Chinese/Korean/Nepali/etc.? --@alex 00:43, 28 March 2008 (EDT)

P.S. I changed Template:Translationlist/item to use Template:langname-xx rather than #language:xx, to avoid my annoyance with Translationlist showing "english | Español" which is how I got on this in the first place - however apart from that minor annoyance, I have to say that your multilingual navtemplate stuff is quite excellent.