On 25.02.20 15:36, Tomek wrote:
> Everyone uses the same learning
> costs when using Esperanto, they do not have the privileged ones.
I'd assume that the cost argument doesn't hold, it's going to be more
easy for Europeans than for e.g. Chinese or Japanese. It starts with
the letters used, which give people that have grown up with a a
Latinbased language a first head start, and it continues with the vocabulary
that is also favoring (west) European learners. (Can't say anything
about the grammer, I'm not that deep into it, but I assume the same
is true for that, too)
> Since you don't want to put in the effort of putting the text in the
> translator, maybe it's best to unsubscribe from this list?
I'm doing customer support for a world wide customer base on a daily
basis, and while automatic translators got quite a bit better over
time,we try to encourage our customers to write to us in English. Auto
translated texts give you a rough idea what the text is about, but
they may fail you completely when it comes to details, or common
phrases, totally failing to transport the actual message.
We use it as a last resort when someone refuses to write to us in
English, but it is a double edged sword.
Contractually we actually enforce the use of English, even when having
someone on the team having the same native language as the customer.
Translations are used on a "best effort" basis, but without guarantees.
Also when replying to auto-translated requests, our replies will have
lots of "if I understood you corretly ..." parts.
While it would be nice to have an universal language that doesn't
favor any nationality, like Latin used to be in the middle ages in
Europe, it's just not practical. For practical purposes it's either
English, or Chinese, with Spanish probably coming up as third.
And as others have already pointed out: when you look at the combined
numbers of people speaking a specific language as either first *or*
additional language, English probably wins (especially if you count
India in as English speaking country, to which some may object), and
as far as I can tell that number is growing the fastest, too.
So while I don't mind seeing someone who indeed doesn't understand
English trying to participate here in their native language, and
relying on automatic translations in that case as its the only
alternative, I don't get the point of someone who's clearly able
to communicate in English trying to make things harder for
everybody else by insisting on using their first language.
(Or did I get fooled by rather good auto translations here?)
In a former company I worked for we had a clear "The burden shall
be on the writer, not the readers" principle. As the number of
readers is usually much larger then the number of writers (typically
one) of a message, that minimizes total effort and overhead (and
this is not limited to language choice and translations alone).
I would say this principle should apply here, too.
PS: While I like the general idea of choosing a common language
like Esperanto, I know that it will fail the same way as "we
should all use an open source word processor". People will still
send you .doc or .docx ... it is a fight you can't win ...
--
hartmut
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