Japanese language?

[NabePla]

Hi,

Whether it is inappropriate to post in this corner?  Please pardon.

I am a person living in the Japanese-speaking world.
Does this Japanese version of pixinsight become possible in the future?

Thank you.


NabePla

[Niall Saunders]

Hello NabePla,

Welcome to the Forum - your command of English is better than the majotity of PixInsight users have in Japanese, so please, you have no need to apologise !

To let you understand, the primary programming for PixInsight is by native Spanish speakers, so adding Japanese, whilst quite possible, would require the assistance of a true 'bi-lingual' speaker of either Japanese and English, or Japanese and Spanish.

It would also be essential for the Japanese translator to be 'technical' and to ideally have some astronomical expertise (or who could work with someone such as yourself).

If you think that you could manage to support such an effort, then this could be taken further, to be discussed outside the PixInsight Forum.

[NabePla]

Hi Niall

Thank you very much for explaining the current state of difficulty of multilingualization including Japanese in this PixInsight.

I will do my best to master the current English version of PixInsight.



NabePla

[Juan Conejero]

Hi NabePla,

Thank you for your suggestion and for your willingness to help, which I appreciate a lot. Many years ago I made the decision to not invest any resources in producing localized versions of PixInsight. The reason is simple: We cannot afford this task. Along with Japanese, we should translate to German, French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Dutch, Russian, ... PixInsight licenses are being sold on 95 countries. Along with localizations, there is the need to maintain and update them as the application and its many tools and scripts evolve and are being updated, which happens fast.

Investing work and time in translations and localizations is wasting our scarce human resources in my opinion. I prefer to put all of our force into working on new tools, new algorithms, bug fixes, improvements, development platforms, and documentation. English is the best vehicle–the only valid vehicle, actually–for the widest possible distribution of a research and development project like PixInsight.

For example, If I had made the decision to release PixInsight in Spanish instead of English at the beginning—the easiest option in my case—, this conversation would not be taking place, and I would probably be working as a cashier at a local supermarket.