mklic --

The WCG does have a project initiated to provide more support in other national languages. They have indicated in the past to offers such as yours that they plan to use IBM employees from the countries speaking these languages in the effort rather than WCG members who have generously offered to help in this as you have. Presently, the priority language being worked on is French. I am not sure where Czech is on the priority list. I will pass along the fact that the registration process might be a subset they should consider seperately and make that available in other languages sooner since only a small number of HTML pages would be necessary for this. Thank you for the suggestion.

Poděkování,

RobSab --

I think the choice of French was due to the close relationship that exists between IBM and Canada and Canadian laws rather than having anything to do with the population speaking the language. I will say, however, that any national language support will probably not come soon. There are a lot of issues regarding how it should be done and what level of support would be required when implemented. I did pass along the idea of subsetting the effort to installation and registration in national languages for their consideration. With the WCG history of not wishing to reveal much about future development, I would not expect to hear anything definate about the suggestion for some time.

Best regards,

RobSab --

While I agree with you 100% that national language support should be based on the number of people speaking the languages, I do not think the decision had anything to do with population. Canada has some rather strong laws which require businesses to utilize both English and French languages. I think (again, I am not an IBM'er on the project team, so this is speculation on my part) that the decision was based on the fact that IBM does business in Canada and is legally bound to provide their products in French as well as in English. Note that even though this is a volunteer project for us, and although it is a charitable effort on IBM's part, the actual coding, support and management are provided by IBM employees who are assigned to the project and are paid to provide that work. Because of this, it might be viewed as a "product" in some legal circles.

Best regards,

A Canadian could probably explain this situation best. I think that it is a subcommittee of UNESCO that is always on the verge of declaring Canada (or the Province of Quebec) guilty of ethnic persecution, because of the formal laws against English. In practice, the situation is not so bad, but the laws seem to exceed what most people consider ordinary human rights. Please don't get the wrong idea. Politics often drives people to support extreme positions that they promptly turn around and mostly ignore in ordinary life.

The World Community Grid is determined to support multiple languages. But there will be a lot of experimentation and experience gained with the second language, after which additional languages will be much easier to add and support. I expect that Francaise has been selected because of the peculiar legal situation in Canada.

This post is Censored because the French Translation is not Twice the size of the English version.