Estonian translation published - here is our story!
Ain Indermitte
With great pleasure I'm announcing the Estonian translation: http://www.agilemanifesto.org/iso/et/
Story of this translation
I (Ain) had been implementing agile software development methods in
my development team at Nokia back in 2006. In summer of 2011 I thought
it would be nice to have an Estonian version of the manifesto officially
available. As I started out on this translation project, I learned that
there was already an effort on-going within Estonian agile community,
but that it had pretty much stalled. The existing google docs
document contained partial translation. As I reached out to several
Estonian agile community members from around the world (Estonia, Sweden,
USA), we re-started the translation project and worked on it over
several translate-review-comment cycles in August-September 2011. At
some point we were all happy with the translation and I took the action
to post it to agilemanifesto.org site for everyone's enjoyment.
As an advice to other translators, I would say that it is of utmost
importance to involve several people (university professors,
programmers/developers, linguists, etc.) in your work. Our translation
looked a lot different - and better - after involving people from
several fields.
I would like to sincerely thank the most active contributors - Marek
Kusmin and Silver Ernesaks - for their support.
With regards,
Ain Indermitte
Issues in Translation- There is no official Estonian word that corresponds to "Agile". Words like "väle" and "nobe" mostly refer to "fast", whereas word "paindlik" refers to flexible, but not quite the meaning of agile. So we decided to introduce a new word "Agiilne". This is not unheard of, as for example the English word "printer" is now in widespread use in Estonian. Also, seems like technical universities use the term "agiilne" in their course materials.
- Seems the English version of the manifesto is done by "techies" without much involvement from the linguists - resulting in not-so-perfect English, and thus making the translation not straightforward either. We opted to fully "Estonialize" the translation - making sure the meaning stays the same, but not necessarily the construction of the sentence. As a result, we believe, the Estonian translation is easy to read and understand for Estonian-speaking audience.