Tha mi ag ionnsachaidh Gà idhlig còmhla ri Sabhal Mòr Ostaig - tha mi a deanamh an Cùrsa Inntrigidh.
For those who haven't a clue what I said I am currently learning (Scottish) Gaelic through the Cùrsa Inntrigidh distance-learning course run by Sabhal Mòr Ostaig in Skye. I will probably start posting in Gaelic as I start to get more confident - we'll see.
While browsing around Sabhal Mòr Ostaig's site, I came across a link to a company called IleTec who, amongst other things sell a word processor called Sgrìobh. I had a quick look at the site, and thought it looked familar - I recognised the GTK-type theme and what I think is the Tango icon set. It turns out that it's based on Abiword. This is quite cool - an entirely Gaelic desktop application. However, it appears that you can't get hold of it without paying £40 for the privilege, and it comes with a Gaelic keyboard (I wonder how this works) and a screensaver. Legally this is fine, there is nothing to stop anyone charging money for distributing GPL software to cover media costs etc. but if you then look at the price list the screensaver itself costs £5 and the keyboard £20. Basically the money seems to be to cover the cost of the dictionary and the localization work. It seems to me that this isn't quite in line with the spirit of the GPL - though that might just be me. Still, it looks well done.
I'd quite like a Gaelic translation for my desktop, preferably GNOME though KDE would be fine, as it would probably help me learn more faster. I suspect that asking for a Gaelic translation for Windows is a bit less likely. I've already taken to using Google in Gaelic, though it's more or less a matter of typing something in a box and hitting Enter, and there's not really much of an interface there to translate. Canonical's Rosetta system looks pretty good for doing translations of software, however I'm not yet in a position where I'd be able to contribute much. Looking at the Dapper Drake entry for Gaelic in Rosetta indicates that 3 out of a possible 326711 items have been translated. I'd love to kick off a project to get this started, either by the community or by professionals - or perhaps some combination of the two?
On a related note, I have bodged the OpenOffice.org Gaelic spellchecking dictionary to install into Firefox 2 and Thunderbird > 1.5, once I have cleaned it up and made it a bit more robust I'll release it.
Edit: I've updated it with some more information from Graham from Iletec, who commented below. Thanks!
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