steinn, neologisms are issue for almost every language that doesn’t have well-established wordbase in given area, which in case of computing means almost every language != english (and in fact english too, although english is very liberal when it comes to coining new words or stuffing old ones into new role, that helps a lot) at one stage or another. Polish also has that problem, although now there’s enough of material and somewhat more seasoned translations / terms coined that you usually know where to begin. Real fun was back in late ’80s and especially ’90s, where almost every term had 2 or more alternative versions. Now only once in a while you run into certain companies which have that great idea to base PL translation team in Ireland, which feels (ie, you got formally correct translation, but it uses for example infamous “karnacje” for “skins", where rest of .pl has long agreed for “skóry").
Oh, and from time to time we get to see referenda for polish term for “email", which usually produces lots of input and none of change in established terminology, that is “email” ;)
Update: So Advogato uses ISO-8859-1 encoding… Kewl. Everyone, poke raph into switching to proper UTF-8!
Update 2: Err, I kinda failed to make my original point… So here it is: while it is inevitable for language to swallow foreing words for computing, and even many of non-english projects and communities use english internally to avoid ambiguity, and of course ugly-ass translation is far worse and more painful than lack of translaiton, yet I like when language has its own identity and at least partially gets to have its own identity, even in such an international area as computing. You know, english is fine laguage, and very convenient, but there are other interesting languages out there too :). So bear with initial pains, and in exchange you’ll get icelandic that still feels like it :)
