Date: 29 May 2000 02:41:31 +0200 From: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Why encourage stupid people to use *BSD WAS:Re: IE forFreeBSDPetition Message-ID: <8gsebr$1mn8$1@bigeye.mips.inka.de> References: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10005262053560.92573-100000@server.highperformance.net> <20000527184152.G3471@welearn.com.au> <8gpbuh$1rba$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> <20000528073517.H3471@welearn.com.au>
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Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> wrote: > > > http://www.welearn.com.au/freebsd/slow/ready.html > > > > In your opinion, is it a part of the exercise that this document > > is in English? > > <hint>Absolutely not!</hint> Ah, but think about it for a moment. - All primary documentation is in English. Translations are always lagging behind and often incomplete. The same holds true for secondary documentation, e.g. things related to ports, or general Unix books. - All primary support fora are in English. There are some mailing lists and newsgroups in other languages, but participation there is much more limited, so the knowledge base is smaller. - Almost all development, and certainly all mainstream development, is handled exclusively in English. The common base for communication with and among developers is English. Effectively, the project language is English. In fact, now that I think about it, our installation routine is available only in English, isn't it? (I've heard that there's a localized Japanese installer, but it isn't in the repository.) I postulate that unless you have a working command of basic written English, you will at most be a second class user, severely limited in your access to all kinds of project information. Note that this holds true for the other BSD projects and Linux as well. - Shouldn't the resources that are spent on translation rather be devoted to improving documentation or code? Are translators really a separate group that wouldn't contribute otherwise if they weren't tied up with translations? For quite some time now I have been holding the belief that not everybody is served well by a unix box on their desktop. Lately, I have become increasingly outspoken about this. The reactions are interesting. Some people seem to be offended that I don't try to fanatically convince them to run "Linux" (they haven't heard of unix yet). My latest scheme to make myself unpopular is to become outspoken about the language issue. I'm sick and tired of the whining about documentation only being available in English. Let's face it, if you don't know English in today's Western culture, you have a far bigger problem than computers. You don't understand the music, you don't understand the advertisements, you have little access to current proceedings in science, engineering, economics, arts, everything. A basic knowledge of English has become a requirement akin to literacy and arithmetic. (I'm particularly fed up with people who claim basic familiarity with English, or any other language for that matter, but insist that they can't read technical documentation in that language, because technical jargon supposedly is too difficult.) -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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