What is ATO?


This page gives a brief description of who forms the ATO. Please, read on!
On 09-May-96 20:22:12, Olaf Peters wrote:

>I'm going to release my Mailtext-CustomClass soon and would like to have
>some catalog translations for the .mcp. Currently available are german and
>english, so if you would like to translate, please contact me, so I can
>send you the package and the .ct file.

>Any help will be greatly appreciated.

I can do Norwegian for you.

And this got me thinking: Someone ought to organise a way for programmers
to have their software translated, say a group of people dedicated to
seeing software in their native languages, willing to translate whatever is
thrown in their direction, and most importantly can be easily reached.
Anyone willing to undertake such a project? Or even better, does anyone
know if such a thing already exists?

This mail, written by Petter E. Stokke and sent on the MUI Mailing List the 12th of May 1996, actually started it all. After this mail, the MUI Mailing List got flooded by mail discussing how to organize such a thing. The result, after lots of sweat, is of course ATO: Amiga Translators' Organization!

The vision

Amiga Translators' Organization was created because for a long time, programmers who wanted translations for their programs would either have to post "Translators wanted"-mails onto newgroups and mailing lists, or they must use translators they knew. This was of course annoying to some users of the mailing lists and newsgroups, it would not give the programmer as many translators as possible, and last, but not least, the programmer didn't have any quality assurance of the translations done by his translators.

ATO was then built as being an organized pool of translators. We want to make programmers' lives as easy as possible by offering many translators for a wide range of languages, and still offer the quality assurance. This quality assurance is done through the proofreading concept which you can see here.

Of course we want to expand, and therefore we always want new members. At the same time, we also want programmers to contact us when they want programs translated instead of disturbing serious users of mailing lists - it was what ATO was made for!!

Who we are

Well, all our members are Amiga users wanting to translate programs into their language. The reasons for wanting to do so are bound to be many: Some like their working environment to be localized, some want to help the Amiga through its bad times, some do it simply for fun...

Many of our members are well-known in the Amiga community as programmers, Amiga magazine writers etc. Just take this example I got from our Italian language administrator who suggested this very page:

Dipietromaria, for example, has translated about 15 applications to Italian and his talent can attract a programmer (...) I'm not so famous in the rest of the world, but I've been developing Amiga applications since 1986 and I've created "Genius" (a program for the Italian users) in 5 years of hard work (Amiga Magazine, Enigma, La Schedina top score). Dipietromaria is a programmer of EasyFR and is one of the more famous Amiga supporters in Italy. Gervasi writes on the best Italian news magazine, in the technical section (Transaction) constantly...

So, as you can see, we certainly have potential! Of course, we do not require this of our new members, only that they can write their language properly and are willing to follow the guidelines for translation that our different language administrators stick out.