GNOME Latine loquitur

Paul Norton has asked on the i18n list about translation of GNOME into Latin. I think this is an interesting idea, and raises a number of good questions about neoLatin vocabulary.

For example, has anyone ever discussed XML in Latin before? Surely they must have; then how do you say tag and element and attribute? I can more readily imagine that nobody’s ever had to discuss X in Latin; there are many good words in neoLatin vocabularies for screen (scrinium or quadrum or album or even monitorium have all been suggested), but nobody may have had to make the technical distinction between a screen and a display before now.  (Someone has suggested that the concept of a display, with its multiple separated viewing-places, could be suggested by a colonnade; this would allow us to use the obscure but beautifully appropriate noun xystus.)  How about workspaces?  There is no prior art in the lexicons.  From the classical period I could suggest tablinum, an office, or from the Middle Ages we could go for cella, a monk’s cell.  Either seems appropriate.  The desktop itself is clearly a tabula, and it made me very happy to discover that compositor is an attested Latin noun, in Cicero no less, meaning “one who arranges”.

But I’m no classicist, and I’m very glad that other people who know much more than I do are wanting to get involved.  Helping out in translations in other languages has taught me a lot about how to write for translators as a programmer, and has helped me recently in making Metacity more translator-friendly.  (I’ll be posting about that in a few days over on the Metacity blog.)  Anyway, in the meantime I’d like to do what I can as a facilitator.  Here’s a Wiki page if you want to help, and if not, and you know any free software classicists, point them over here.

(Adaptation of GNOME logo by me, and used by permission. Title correction from Rafael– thank you.)