Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 08 Dec 1998 15:18:32 +0100 | From | Marcin Dalecki <> | Subject | Re: Internationalizing Linux |
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Horst von Brand wrote: > Then think the other way around: I've learned CSc from books and papers > written in English (mostly because there is not much else), I stare at code > written in English, read the manual in English, and have to translate what > I see there into Spanish and back to understand error messages.
Which will give the correct results only under the assumption that there is a one to one mapping between the semantics of different human messages. This assumptin turns out to be utterly wrong in fact. Most singlelingual people underestimate terrible the impact of cultural connotations on the languages.
> > > o There needs to be some standard message identifier if > > this is going to go at all. > > Exactly! It's called "Standard phrase in English" right now. Works fine > (If you look, most people that are concerned by this are from the USA, in > other parts of the world an (even limited) knowledge of English is part of > everybody's secondary schooling, at least).
Never mind but most of the world doesn't care about english as much. In fact please note that basic english in German usually results in an much better understanding of this language than in for example Poland. Just becouse the similarities between German and English are much higher than for example any slavic language. Therefore don't underestimate please how many people out there have a real problem with this. (It just happens that on an english speaking list You don't get any sight of them ...)
> And nobody will bother (or dare) translate them, so I get to see messages > in English (written by Alan Cox),
no problem
> in Swedish (by Linus),
damn! (should be however managable if You know German...)
> some in Italian
maybe he could be persuaded to use latin?
> (by Andrea), > or Bill Hawes in German,
kein Problem > and Alexey in Russian... boy, will
Bez problemaw, Tawariszcz!
> _that_ be fun.
Certainly... Ah badly the Soviets lost the cold war on technological area and we need to live with this English instead of the wonderfull, and in my oppinion much better suited for technical purposes, since it's a lot less terse, Russian. However fortunately the Chinees didn't get it. No offence at the language itself intendid. But it would certainly prevent me from having anything to do with informatics to no end. Just imagine to issue a shutdown in the broken pictographic alphabet :-)...
> Or worse: I get nicely formatted messages in German, that some kind soul > translated. Perhaps without a clue of what was going on inside the code, > so she perhaps completely misunderstood the intent...
This is the reason I hate translated programms...
And btw. The whole message translating thing should be really done in sysklogd in user space if anywhere. The only thing which can't be done there are the first 4096 bytes of boot messages...
Marcin
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