02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

When Petter discovered “Ada & Zangemann”, he immediately felt the urge to make sure the story was available to the Norwegian speakers. Now “Ada og Zangemann - En fortelling om programvare, rullebrett og bringebæris” has been published and was presented during the Norwegian local celebrations of the “I Love Free Software Day”. Read Petter’s story!Support FSFE: https://my.fsfe.org/support

Ada’s Norwegian adventure begins!

When Petter discovered “Ada & Zangemann”, he immediately felt the urge to make sure the story was available to the Norwegian speakers. Now “Ada og Zangemann - En fortelling om programvare, rullebrett og bringebæris” has been published and was presented during the Norwegian local celebrations of the “I Love Free Software Day”. Read Petter’s story!

In November 2023, I first encountered the children’s book Ada & Zangemann, written by Matthias Kirschner and illustrated by Sandra Brandstätter. It quickly became clear to me that this was a story I wanted to see available in my native language. That thought led me to get in touch with the author and dive into the book git repository to figure out what would be required to produce a Norwegian Bokmål edition.

Before I started translating the book, I wanted to change the build process for HTML and PDF editions, in order to simplify the translation process and make it possible to keep track of how the translation corresponds with the original and other languages. I submitted a patch that implemented gettext PO files to maintain translations, creating PO files for existing translations, which was well received. Together with Nico Rikken from the Netherlands we have changed the book building process. It now uses DocBook XML, which is automatically converted to Scribus XML and to HTML for typesetting and website publishing. This is either done directly or combined with translations in PO format into a translated edition. With this in place, the translator work could finally begin on the translation platform Weblate.

For the actual translating work, I received valuable help from two other volunteers, Hagen Echzell and Henrik G. Sundt. They both assisted with the translation from English and coordinated the Norwegian translation with the German original. Without their help, the book would not have been finished yet.

The translation and the book were actually ready in December, but due to some technical changes required in the final stages to ensure the manuscript met Lulu's distribution requirements, it was not available to a wider audience until after New Year. The result is that I am very happy to announce that the Norwegian Bokmål translation is ready and available for ordering in print via lulu.com alongside my other published books.

During my conversations with the author, he told me that encouraging readers to buy an extra copy of his book and donate it to their local library had proven to be a very effective approach. It’s an idea that I wholeheartedly support. If you think this book deserves a wider audience, consider ordering an additional copy and donating it to a library that doesn’t yet have it in its collection.

If you choose to do so, I’d appreciate it if you could email me letting me know which library you plan to donate the book to. This will help me to keep track of which libraries have already received a copy and make it easier to identify those that still might benefit from one.

The book was officially launched during the Norway celebrations of the I Love Free Software Day organised by the Norwegian Unix User Group (NUUG).

Moreover, NUUG is purchasing around 100 books for organising different events and giving it away at local spots, mainly libraries.

The book's terms of use are Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, which allows everyone to share and modify both raw files and the finished result, as long as all who receive the content can do the same. Any surplus from book sales goes to the FSFE.

My next step will be to see if we can produce more language editions of the book, starting with a Nynorsk edition of Norwegian. The first draft of the Nynorsk translation is ready, but it probably needs quite a lot of proofreading before it is ready for publication. If you are interested in contributing to additional language editions, please have a look at the Weblate project and get in touch with me via email.

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