About Akerbeltz

You’ve guessed it, I’m not a software developer. I come at this whole software business from the end user and the translator point of view, which can make life a little frustrating but I’ve found that a healthy dose of sarcasm helps. That, and too much coffee.

I was dragged from my cozy world of translation by a friend, Kevin Scannell, who perhaps not entirely innocently asked me in a Dublin pub why there weren’t any Gaelic browsers. To which my response was that I’d have long translated one but that my two attempts at getting into bed with Mozilla had failed miserably because I just don’t “speak code”. He promised help, which he duly did. Once I’d done Firefox, Opera was the next logical choice, and oh, OpenOffice had fallen way behind, then there was this fork to LibreOffice and browsers should really have a spellchecker and… oh you get the drift.

In spite of my criticisms of some of the aspects of it, I actually really enjoy localizing software. Honest gov. It’s oddly satisfying to see the words of a small language flicker into existence on a screen. A bit like watching a kākāpō chick hatch.