There are results that, when they arrive, make you stop for a moment. It happens when you discover that someone, on the other side of the world, has encountered your work and decided to dedicate their time to it. That is what happened to me with Biblos.
One day I received an eMail from Xinhai Yu, a university student in China. With great respect, he told me that he had been impressed by Biblos and proposed translating it into Simplified Chinese. My first reaction was somewhat skeptical. It was not the first time someone had offered to translate Biblos, only to disappear when faced with the complexity of the work. So I explained to him honestly that Biblos is not easy to translate and that a complete localization requires time, attention, and a good knowledge of the program. I showed him the process through which he could assess the work concretely, and told him to let me know, only after seeing it, whether he was really willing to take it on.
A few days later, Xinhai wrote to me again. He told me, with a sense of responsibility that impressed me, that he had realized the work was beyond his abilities. Precisely because he understood its importance, he preferred not to take it on without being sure he could do it well. He did not want to abandon the idea, though: he thought that one of his fellow students, who was more experienced in Computer science, might be the right person.
A few more days passed, and Alan Wu wrote to me. He told me that Xinhai had informed him about the project and offered to do the translation. I explained to him too that this was not a simple job and that he would need to know Biblos well before he could translate it. Alan agreed. I then connected him to the platform we use to share translation files, so that I could follow and supervise the work.
Alan told me he would send me the translation within a week. I smiled to myself, because I knew that was impossible. Weeks went by, and I saw practically no activity in the Dropbox folder. I thought it had gone the same way as the other times: they had disappeared too. Then, after about a month, Alan wrote to me. The localization was ready, he told me, and I could find it in the folder. Xinhai and Alan had worked together, proceeding in a coordinated way until they completed it. They had not followed exactly the process I had suggested to them, but the result still impressed me: they had completed the Biblos localization in about a month. For a program as complex as Biblos, that is a surprisingly short time.
Anyone who develops Software knows how demanding it is to fully localize a program. In the case of Biblos, every element of the interface must retain its meaning and function even when the language changes. Whoever translates software at this level also transfers into their own language the way that software communicates with the people who use it.
The story, however, did not end with the translation. Today, as I publish the version of Biblos with its interface in Simplified Chinese, I continue to exchange messages with Xinhai and Alan. I am trying to help them get to know Biblos more and more deeply, including its more particular aspects, because I believe that in the future they could become a point of reference for anyone who wants to learn about and use Biblos in China.
Biblos was born in Italy. When I started developing it, I never imagined that one day two people in China would decide to dedicate their time to bringing it into their own language. Back then, Biblos was simply a project I was building, day after day. Today, looking at this Chinese version, I realize that a project can take paths its author had never imagined. One of those paths is now right in front of me.
For this reason, my sincere thanks go to Alan Wu and Xinhai Yu.
From today, a Chinese person using Biblos can encounter it directly in their own language. This, more than any number, is the concrete meaning of this localization. Simplified Chinese opens Biblos to one of the world's largest linguistic communities and allows people who use Braille, work in education, or produce accessible documents to discover the tool without having to go through a foreign language.
Today, Biblos also lives through the people who encounter it in other countries. The Chinese version is a concrete demonstration of this. After so many years of development, I am still struck by the fact that the project continues to find paths that I myself had not foreseen. Sometimes you build something thinking you know where it might go, and then someone encounters it, makes it their own, and opens up a new path for it.
When something like this happens, you understand that the journey of a project can become much greater than the journey of the person who created it. Biblos was born in Italy, but this time, part of its journey began in China.
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