[Gnumed-devel] Re: MedinTux needs french to english translators to spread worldwide

[Andreas Tille]

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008, Sebastian Hilbert wrote at gnumed list:

> MedinTux is a powerful medical software, multiuser (using MySQL for data
> storage), easy-to-use (thanks to Qt development toolkit), complete, working
> from the GP to the hospital.

I had the pleasure to get a demonstration of MedinTux last year at LSM
in Amiens directly from Gérard Delafond (main author).  I admit it
looked cool and while I would consider it a reasonable target for
Debian Med (if somebody would find the time to package it) I remember 
the opinion of Gérard here: MedinTux is strictly adapted to the
French health care system.  At this time (this has changed obviosely)
he was convinced that it is neither possible nor reasonable to create
a practice management system that works in different countries.  That's
why he told me that translation makes no sense - and I admit that certain
country specific things are influencing the design of a practice management
system, but I told him that a strict modularisation might enable a
system that could be useful for different systems.

Considering the English web page [1] Gérard seems to have changed his
mind (I'm really happy about this) because this call for help has to
be taken serious.

> Its unique design makes it the most customisable
> software you can dream of. Unfortunately, MedinTux is written in french,
> closing its use to many countries in the world. Help is wanted to
> translate -The GUI (directly in the source code, which will be reverse
> translated later to french, using Qt Linguist).

I might sound unproductive here, but I hope you allow me some warning
words.  I do not think that it is done by simply translating strings.
I have no idea how MedinTux evolved in the last year but as Gérard
pointed out it is not only a language problem but you have to keep the
health care system in mind.  So IMHO a reasonable modularisation and
abstraction has to come first before you start translating strings in
the GUI source code.  Thus I would suggest to start a discussion about
design on a relevant mailing list (or similar channel) before people
start spending their time blindly.

> The documentation and installation instructions

I'm not a friend of translation installation instructions - I prefer
ready to install packages for your distribution which work solidly over
several pages of text which is hard to understand by the target audience
but well, an English installation instruction to enable non French speakers
to build those packages might be really helpful.

> Any person with real french to english skill is
> wellcome. Please, contact Gérard Delafond : gerard-at-delafond.org Main page:
> http://medintux.org/medintux/index.html

So what I would suggest is that not only French speaking people try
to get in contact with Gérard (he speaks English as well) but people
who are interested in practice management software in general and
perhaps trying to think about cooperation with GNUmed makes sense so
perhaps even discussing here on the GNUmed list might make perfectly
sense.

Kind regards

       Andreas.

[1] http://medintux.org/medintux/en/index.html

--
http://fam-tille.de