Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:59:29 -0500 (CDT) From: Sergey Babkin <babkin@verizon.net> To: xcllnt@mac.com Cc: arch@freebsd.org, gordon@tetlows.org Subject: Re: Re: On errno Message-ID: <11462013.196742.1238698769903.JavaMail.root@vms062.mailsrvcs.net>
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Apr 2, 2009 01:04:19 AM, [1]xcllnt@mac.com wrote: >On Apr 1, 2009= , at 9:28 AM, Gordon Tetlow wrote: > >> On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 = at 9:13 AM, Marcel Moolenaar <[2]xcllnt@mac.com> &= gt;> wrote: >> Oh, and yes: I have been thinking about localiza= tion of the kernel. >> While I don't see this to be urgent or crit= ical to FreeBSD itself, >> I can see a "market" for it. >>= ; >> This is an interesting discussion in light of the recent arti= cle >> about the "Ugly American Programmer." Basically it says t= hat >> programmers all understand English (or we can basically e= xpect them >> to), so as long as the information is for programm= ers (user/kernel >> barrier qualifies in my mind), is it hugely = important? > >Errors are never for programmers. They are for pr= ograms or users. >Programs work less well on strings, especially when= those strings >are "designed" to be printed and thus targeted toward= s users. >Interpretation of such error messages is just painful. On t= op of >that, the user may want a localized message. > >Wh= en arguments in the discussion on i18n or l10n focus on the >develope= r, the argument is flawed by definition and pretty much >useless. Onl= y when users are considered in such discussions will >you have a mean= ingful discussion. There are two kinds of error messages: some are m= ore important for the users, some for developers. The system messages te= nd to be more important for developers. The messages in the end-user app= lications may be more importants for the users. Also, if the users are n= ot particularly computer-literate, even the translated messages look lik= e gibberish to them. On the other hand, for teh support people it's easi= er to deal with the original messages. For the developers, the trans= lated messages are a major pain. What if someone reports about a bug in = your program and attaches its log messages in a foreign language? I've h= ad to deal with such situations. You see some message in Spanish and get no= idea, what does it mean. Search through the translated messages, find i= t there, find how it maps to the English message. Sometimes the funny ch= aracters get cut along the way, so searching becomes more complicated. A= nd things get even worse with more strange languages like Japanese or Ru= ssian. -SB References 1. 3D"mailto:xcllnt@mac.com" 2. 3D"mailto:xcllnt@mac.com"
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