statCounter: GNU/Linux and ChromeOS Now Measured at 2.78% in Japan (It Used to be Less Than 0.5%)
THIS past summer we began to notice growing adoption of GNU/Linux in Japan, based on statCounter's data. We said that "GNU/Linux and ChromeOS in Japan: Nearly Trebling in the Past Half a Decade (COVID-19 Breakout)" because that really 'took off' half a decade ago. Right now ChromeOS is measured at 0.68% and GNU/Linux "proper" at 2.11%. It's an impressive increase in a country relatively slow to adopt Free software.
Yesterday Akira Urushibata from Japan wrote to libreplanet-discuss about GNU's translations for the Japanese audience - a subject he covered last month. He has just issued a "[c]all to check translations of project documents", stating:
I emailed the article titled "The Japanese translation of the term 'free software'" to some acquaintances and received responses. They give me concerns.
The leader of GNU Taler checked the Japanese documents on their official site and discovered that "free software" is translated into a Japanese expression for "open source software that is liberal". This is not what he desires. [*]
A Chinese acquaintance tells me that with Google translation turns Japanese "jiyuu" (free, liberal) into Chinese "mian fei" (free of charge). This is strange. The above two words are written in different Chinese characters while "jiyuu" and "ziyou" are written in the same characters. The Japanese imported the word centuries ago. You may notice the similarity in pronunciation. This odd translation may be happening only in certain contexts. It is possible that this shows us a limitation of artificial intelligence systems which are trained to imitate popular text patterns. "Jiyuu sofutouea" is not popular.
A volunteer might submit work that is largely or even entirely machine translation output and may fail to inform others about it. Some project sites may be providing machine translations via outside services as a substitute for documents which humans have not worked on.
If you work on or are closely associated to a GNU project, I recommend contacting those in charge of documents and internationalization and suggest checking the translations. Key terms including "free software" may be expressed by words far from GNU guidelines in translations. Below are some resources available from the official GNU project site. Volunteers should read these documents before starting with work.
Translations of the term "free software" http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fs-translations.html
Guide to Translating Web Pages on www.gnu.org http://www.gnu.org/server/standards/README.translations.html
Interpreters Guide http://www.gnu.org/server/standards/translations/interpreters-guide.html
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Note [*] Some projects tolerate the term "open source" to some degree and allow it to appear in documents. Mostly they don't want to offend those who prefer the name.
However, using "open source" or some modification of it as a translation of "free software" is a substantially different matter.
Akira Urushibata
For Japan to adopt "free software" would mean better defenses against enemies across the sea. For instance, there are lots of reports of Russian, Chinese, and North Korean advanced persistent threats (APTs) targeting Windows, even if sloppy news sites omit the mention of Windows, as we last explained less than a month ago. █