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Subject: Re: internationalization
To: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 96 14:57:41 MET
From: Greg Lehey <lehey.pad@sni.de>
Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.org
In-Reply-To: <199603210941.KAA12190@uriah.heep.sax.de>; from "J Wunsch" at Mar 21, 96 10:41 am
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>
> As Chuck Robey wrote:
>
>> I am just a little puzzled on one point.  In ports, we have a healthy
>> sized couple of sections dedicated to ports that have been handcrafted
>> for Russian and Japanese FreeBSDers.  I was thinking about this, and I
>> occurred to me that probably the largest group of FreeBSDers with a
>> non-English home tongue would be the Germans.  How come there is no
>> German section?
>
> German is in the unusual advantage that it can be run with a simple
> 8-bit clean environment without much tweaking, now that ISO-8859-1 is
> de facto the default font for most things around here in a Unix
> environment.

It's not as simple as that.  Most other Western European languages
have this advantage as well, but in, say, France or Portugal you would
probably find that a large number of people would prefer to have
native language support.  I certainly found this while helping out
with Walnut Creek CDROM at the InfoForum in Paris last month: a large
number of people were interested in FreeBSD, but didn't take it
because there was no French language support.

I think the reasons why Germans are not overly interested in German
languages support are:

1.  Traditionally, German documentation has been turgid and
    inaccurate.
2.  There is no real standard for the terminology.
3.  Germans speak relatively good English.
4.  The people you're asking are on this list, which is in English.
    Ask a German language list and you might get a different kind of
    reply.

Greg