There is a good point buried in there: I often paste error mesages into google even when I *do* understand them. (I dont really care too much about the error message : I want to know about the fix or workaround)
Having system level error messages internationalized means that there wont be a global sharing of knowledge and chit chat about errors. OTOH, what good would you really be able to get out of a chinese language discussion of a workaround for some obscure kernel bug? Probably not much unless it had large chunks of source code in it. So we're probably not losing much.
Any error message that has some value in being globally searcheable could still have a non-translated error message ID portion, such as: glibc:socketcore:error 3424AE63: <translated text> I dont know how much effort that would be worth. Maybe always adding the errno to printouts of c lib errors is a worthwhile start.
Regardless, I dont think we can easily reap the benefits of having a universal human language without first suffering its drawbacks.
"A japanese system administrator should be able to read the error
messages in japanese."
Then the Japanese administrator doesn't understand the error message,
so they cut and paste it into Google to find out what it means. And
they don't get any answers, because the answers exist in other
languages (most likely, English).
-- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
