Sacha Chua wrote:
I love discussing things with people and learning new things. Talked
to pusakat, who enlightened me about the long-term usefulness of
localization. Silly me. It's not a short-term thing. It's not
something for the people who already use Debian or Linux (and who have
no problems with English). It's for people who are going to be very
new and very nervous about all of this, and they're going to find
Debian much friendlier because Debian's made an effort to reach out.
It is also, in my opinion, a very good thing to support the efforts of
people who are trying to keep languages spoken by relatively small groups
of people alive and healthy. If this means working out how to apply that
language to use with a word processor, the debian installer, or whatever,
good for them! I think there is a great deal of worth in having software,
and especially open source software, available in languages other than the
most common ones.
I come from somewhere (Australia) that has lost literally hundreds of
languages in the last couple of centuries, and we are *still* losing them.
This means we are losing the diversity of thought and expression
associated with all those languages. The fact that we effectively force
the remaining speakers to use English whenever they use modern technology,
just for lack of a useful alternative, is a great shame. I am sure the
same would apply to Tagalog and many other languages as well.
Helen
(who is ashamed to admit to being an English-only speaker, but who is
really impressed by the efforts some in this project are making to make
Things In General more accessible to non-English-speakers)
