L10n:WorldReady/Simple English
From MozillaWiki
tl;dr: Write copy in Simple English (en-simple), make en-US just another locale.
From en-US as the first language to en-US as the first translation.
People
- owner
- stas
- technical support
- engagement contact
Advantages
- copy is easier to understand
- en-US can make late changes to their "localization", unless the semantic meaning changes too much
- it's easier to avoid the word-for-word kind of translation for the localizers, since the Simple English conveys the messages without imposing too much of the sentence structure or vocabulary on the translator
Possible issues
- how to make 'downgrading' en-US to en-simple easy?
- is it possible to populate en-US's PO files automatically?
- how to make debugging easier? grep will not work.
Next steps
- implement a prototype and test run in on one of the new engagement projects,
- come up with a first iteration of the word list for the Basic English. I think that it's OK to have a lot of false positives in there for now; we should continue trimming it (or adding words) as we gain more experience.
- prototype a tool that looks for words not on en-simple's wordlist, to help copywriters create en-simple copy.
Wordlists
Any existing wordlist would likely need to be amended to include some of the vacabulary that is specific to the Web and the browser.
- Basic English seems to be too restrictive (only 850 words)
- BE 1500 (combined) is actually around 2,600 words. Good candidate?
- Voice of America's Special English (1500)
- Simplified Technical English, STE, used mostly in aeronautics
- good writing rules, see http://www.asd-ste100.org/
- copyrighted material, not sure if we can use it
Other resources
How useful these are?
