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Community Localization: Brazilian version of VS 2008 and .NET FX 3.5

We aspire to reach customers from around the world with our products. People speak and work in different languages depending on where you are in the world. To make it easy for people to be able to use our products in a language of their choice, we localize our products and the documentation that goes with that into a number of languages. I have always said that we run into a scale issue no matter how much energy and resources we put into this. To me, one way to truly reach scale here is to enable the community to localize into their favorite language which will certainly augment what we do and provide broader reach for our products to customers around the world.

Community localization uses a combination of machine-translation and post-editing by community members to extend the reach of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework to new languages and locales. Full community localization for Visual Studio includes two pillars - a Visual Studio Language Pack for software and an MSDN Translation Wiki for documentation.

I am pleased to announce that as of today, Brazil is the first of what I hope will become new geographies in which we can provide such a community localization offering.

In March, we released the first Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions Language Pack in Brazilian. The Language Pack, which is a free add-on that installs on top of the English version of the product, provides partial localization into Brazilian Portuguese of about 70% of the user interface.

Today, we are announcing the release of MSDN Translation Wiki v2 for Brazilian Portuguese which provides an infrastructure for users to edit machine-translated content and add comments, code snippets or content to the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 documentation. This is hosted on MSDN2 and therefore it is fully accessible through F1 within the Visual Studio 2008 Integrated Developer Environment. This also provides a light-weight, inline sentence-level editing experience that propagates user edits automatically throughout the site.

With MSDN Translation Wiki v2 and the Visual Studio Language Pack we are empowering developers in Brazil by offering a fully integrated solution for those who want to be able to use Visual Studio and read the related documentation in their native language.

It is great to see us partnering with our Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and some of the most prestigious academic institutions in Brazil in these community localization projects: MVPs have helped us define the core Visual Studio terminology through a community glossary forum; computer science students from Pontifícia Universidade Católica and Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica helped improve the quality of a portion of the content by tech reviewing and post-editing the most popular topics after they were machine translated; students from the Engineering school of the Universidade de São Paulo translated and tested part of the Visual Studio Language Pack. MVPs and Microsoft Student Partners and other community members will help us as moderators on the Translation Wiki site, reviewing and approving translation edits and suggestions.

I am very excited to see such great progress made in Brazil. My international team is now looking at expanding these and new language solutions to several other markets for the next version of Visual Studio. If you interested in participating to these community localization projects and assisting with translating into your native language, please contact Cristina Nardini of the Community Localization Team.

Namaste!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2008
    > Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition... add-on... Would you please expand on how this possible? The following site states that add-ons are only for Standard+: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc149003.aspx In the past there were legal issues with at least one major add-in that tried to support Express editions. Speaking personally, at my last company we needed to develop a plug-in. After investigating our options, we ultimately went with an Eclipse plug-in since we needed a free environment and Express was not possible. Has this restriction changed? I would love to develop Express add-ins, but everything that I can find states otherwise.

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2008
    Hi, could you please elaborate on howto revert Visual Studio to English? I've installed VS on a (in my case) Dutch system and error messages (compiler errors) also appear in dutch. This is quite confusing because the error messages are not as descriptive as the english ones (which Im used to anyway). Regards, Nathan

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2008
    I agree with Nathan: an english language pack for people who have installed a non-english version of VS would probably make more sense. FWIW I'm German, and no developer I know uses a German version of VS. You have to learn all the English terms anyway, because the APIs are in English; German IDE and error messages just mean that you have to memorize two names for the same thing. Also, googling error messages works far better for English messages.

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2008
    Actually, funnily enough my Visual Studio is actually an english one, its just that apparantly the system settings are leading in Visual Studio (or the framework language overrides the VS language). Anyways, I agree with you Niki, you have all the right reasons (where googling errors in english obviously works much much better).

  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2008
    Hi Nathan, Could you send your exact system configuration settings to stbicloc@microsoft.com? This will help us to solve your problem more precisely. Regarding Niki's point regarding the need of an English language pack, this is part of the language pack expansion plans we are looking at for the next version of Visual Studio. Thanks, Patrick

  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2008
    Já vi muitas pessoas pedindo para o VS e MSDN ser traduzido para o português, o que não acontecia, mas

  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2008
    Patrick, I get an error on your emailaddress: The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 5.1.1 User unknown. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. Regards, Nathan

  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2008
    Hi Nathan, I am not detecting any problem with stbicloc@microsoft.com on our end, so I am not sure what is causing this problem. Could you try stbibmt@microsoft.com instead? Sorry for the inconvenience, Thanks, Patrick

  • Anonymous
    April 17, 2008
    Somasegar wrote: > This is because Express is aimed primarily at making > it easy for beginners to get started on programming. I've heard that story many times. And that's all it is: a story. I use Professional at work only because I am forced to; however, at home I choose to use Express even though I also own Pro. Express is VS without the bloat. Sure, there are a few nice things left out of Express, but I'd estimate about 90% of Professional I just don't use nor want. I've been developing software for about two decades now, so I hardly count as a beginner. I know many, many other professional developers who share similar opinions with me. Rather, I suppose the real reason for Express is to offer something free to combat NetBeans and Eclipse and other free alternative IDEs. I can certainly understand that. However, the beginner story is just ridiculous. By the way, great job on Express 2008. Excellent product.

  • Anonymous
    April 17, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2008
    原文发表地址] Community Localization: Brazilian version of VS 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 [原文发表时间] Monday, April 14

  • Anonymous
    May 27, 2008
    I'm from Brazil. I liked this post. In Brazil have a big Microsoft Community then it's a good opportunity for Microsoft and for Brazil.

  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2008
    That is a great opportunity for the Brazilians! Visual Studio 2008 em Português pt-BR para todos os desenvolvedores do Brasil!!