On 25/07/2012, Morgan Leijström <[email protected]> wrote: > The system source and interface must be written in *one* consistent > language. >
I'm not sure I understand the imperative. If I were a native speaker of Spanish I would probably prefer to write my code in Spanish. Indeed, back in the days when most freely available programs were published as source code in magazines, I had great fun typing programs from Spanish magazines into my ZX Spectrum. Of course, any text which would be displayed to the user I preferred to translate into English. Surely it is a similar problem when the "program" is a whole operating system. If I expect my users to be of many nationalities then I would also expect to have to do some translating. The consistency of which you speak comes from having the translations expected by the population of users. > And the fact is that the most common used language in the system is en_US > > Therefor it should be purified to *en_US* > > And all other en_* should be translations. Again we seem to differ. I hope you didn't mean "purified", that's probably just a mis-translation where something like "rationalised" or "simplified" might have been a better choice. Where we really differ, though, is in regarding all languages (with the exception of the US variant of English) as being targets for translation. I would not discriminate against our trans-atlantic cousins in that way. I would include their language as a valid target for translation and then we would all be equal. > > Also read the bug linked in Marjas post > Yes, I have read it before. I even had a discussion along similar lines a few years back on a Mandrake or Mandriva forum. It just underlines the different approaches to the subject taken by programmers and users (although I am sure there is some blurring round the edges). Programmers are not necessarily linguists. Those who are are may not have English as their native language. I suppose if we were debating whether Castillian or Latin American Spanish should be the default with the other requiring translation then I too might wonder at all the fuss. Surely it couldn't matter to castellanos that they must conform to Central & Southern America norms, could it? Sensitive cultural and social use of language is much too complex a subject for people who focus on logic to understand, especially in a foreign language. > > Or why not write all in lojban ;) > > /Morgan Now you are getting the idea! Bravo.
