Date: Wed, 18 Jan 95 16:43:50 MST From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: charnier@lirmm.fr (Philippe Charnier) Cc: cacho@eureka.gdl.iteso.mx, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: CVS stuff Message-ID: <9501182343.AA03975@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <199501181814.TAA20913@lirmm.lirmm.fr> from "Philippe Charnier" at Jan 18, 95 07:14:22 pm
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> > Salut, Huh?!? What's that mean? 8-). ============================================================================ Hypothetical question an answer(s): ============================================================================ > >> Oh, and I'd be willing to work on the English, Japanese and French, and > >> if no one else wante to, German (and maybe Greek -- I'm very, very rusty). > >> > > I'd like to work on the Spanish translation of error messages, > >i have a lot of users and sysadmin-to-be guys that are unable to read > >english. > > After lot of translations I will be pleased to send to the world the > following mail: > > Something is wrong with my computer, I had the message: > > << Probleme materiel au demarrage : clavier absent > Appuyer sur une touche pour continuer >> > > Is there a hacker that can 1) speak french 2) help me? Since you are apparently an English speaker (since only the error message itself was in French and your complaint was not), could you reset (or unset) your locale so that we can see the English message so we can better help you? > NB : the french message says: > hardware failure on boot : no keyboard connected > press any key to continue PS: I know; that one was an easy read. PPS: That particular message is impossible, since you could not have set your locale information prior to actually booting. PPPS: Please contact your vendor; since your boot code has been localized, it was obviously supplied by someone other than the FreeBSD core team. They will be better equipped to handle problems you encounter using their code. PPPPS: Thank you for using FreeBSD. PPPPPS: If you are going to localize your machine, you should also localize your console and your mail program. For French, you would need an ISO8859-1 transfer encoding, and your console would actually produce left and right Guillemot insetad of '<<' and '>>'. ============================================================================ By the way, this problem already exists in the BIOS generated "no operating system" message. The idea of a translated message prior to getting into a user environment is a straw man. If designing the system all by myself, I'd probably include catalog indices as well... so a message might be: moose: 115: Command not found So any potential "helper" could look in their catalog for the 'moose' program and determine error message 115, if everything else went to hell. A person without the 'moose; catalog isn't a potential helper, since they don't even have the 'moose' program. Of course, your average English only person won't know if you said (translated for the hypothetical omnicient English reader): Help! I'm getting the error moose: 115: Command not found when I didn't expect it! OR Help! I not getting the error moose: 115: Command not found when I should be! Since the only readable portion of the message will continue to be the error, whether it's readable because of the catalog index or because we are lazy and only support error reporting in English. Having the error decipherable -- or straight readable -- doesn't help the reader understand the problem, since the error message is only part of the context. The generic soloution proposed thus far is "make everyone learn English". This probably won't go over well in France. It *doesn't* go over well in a lot of countries. All of this ignores the fact that this hypothetical non-English speaker is not going to be able to read the documentation that says Please send problem reports to questions@freebsd.org So you won't be getting email reporting problems anyway. Maybe if the person with the problem sent a MIME encapsulated message with an audio attachment. I'm told that if you speak French loudly and slowly enough, anyone can understand it. 8-) 8-). Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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