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A Tokyo trip reportA Tokyo trip reportPosted Jul 19, 2007 7:37 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227)Parent article: A Tokyo trip report
Curse that Tower of Babel! :)
I have to admit, I probably have a pretty unpopular opinion of this situation, given how unpopular my opinion on similar things with disabled people are. Namely, not everyone gets to join in, and no, that ain't always fair. The guy in a wheelchair can't come to field combat with any of my combat groups, and the guy who doesn't speak English doesn't get to participate in my development projects. Simple as that.
The development project at least is open to people who want to learn English. Which, while hard (I know I've never managed to learn any Japanese, and I can't remember a stitch of Latin or Spanish which I did learn at one point), isn't impossible, and is something those people are just going to have to accept as necessary if they want to use software written by English speaking people.
Yeah, maybe I'm an unsympathetic ass, but I just don't see much point in whining about reality.
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A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 19, 2007 8:16 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link] Right. We struggle so much for interoperability of computing systems yet try to keep political correctness about interoperability between people. Certainly, unless some global catastrophic disruptions happen, the mankind will largely speak a single language in 100-200 years or so from now. I believe the amount of work-time needed to translate all available in English technical documentation to another language is larger than the time to learn English for all people that speak that given language. And this disproportion will only grow with time.
PS. I don't speak English natively.
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 19, 2007 9:35 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] mankind will largely speak a single language in 100-200 years or so from nowI don't think, but still, it's really useful to learn English, not only to participate in free software projects, but it's quite good if one travels to foreign countries (people living from tourism tend to speak English even in Japan or France) or to read the newest Harry Potter book when it's published, not when it's translated. There's a Hungarian proverb: "you're as many people as many language you speak", which is very true.
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 19, 2007 10:44 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] > people living from tourism tend to speak English even in Japan or France
Well, don't be so sure ;) At least in France, it's really far from the truth...
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 26, 2007 5:50 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] > France) or to read the newest Harry Potter book when it's published, not when it's translated.
The correlation between tourism and speaking English is not that good: France,Italy and Spain are the first countries for the tourism in Europe but nothern country are much better for the language skills (I'm French).
As for Harry Potter books, they are not very good to learn English: too hard as many words are related to mythical creature, etc, and Lois Mac Master Bujold or Asimov books are much better :-)
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 19, 2007 9:44 UTC (Thu) by pcampe (subscriber, #28223) [Link] >Certainly, unless some global catastrophic disruptions happen, the mankind>will largely speak a single language in 100-200 years or so from now.
200 years from now, we have real-time, multi-language, inch-size translators, so won't be the need for a global language, an impoverishment from the cultural diversity and richness we have now with many different languages with millions of books and documents written.
If I can say, I've noted that a very tiny part of american people care about speaking a foreign language, so they underestimate the difficult for a non-english speaking person to use another language for everyday's work, and I guess that if american are not so american-centric, this would help a lot in interoperability between people.
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 19, 2007 10:37 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link] > 200 years from now, we have real-time, multi-language, inch-size translators, so won't be the need for a global language, an impoverishment from the cultural diversity and richness we have now with many different languages with millions of books and documents written.
If these "real-time, multi-language, inch-size translators" are so good, the "millions of books" would be translated with no problem.
> If I can say, I've noted that a very tiny part of american people care about speaking a foreign language
People are lazy; true for any nationality/locality. Americans are lucky to be born in a country where the native language is (as of today, at least) the least common denominator in science and business.
> so they underestimate the difficult for a non-english speaking person to use another language for everyday's work
Don't envy ;-). The more people learn English today, the sooner your dream of "inch-size translators" will become reality...
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 19, 2007 14:30 UTC (Thu) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link] > 200 years from now, we have
First, I want the jetpacks, the flying cars and the moon colonies they promised me for seven years ago.
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 19, 2007 18:02 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link] It has less to do with not caring about other languages, and more just to do with practicality. If I am doing work in English, either I need to learn your language so you can help or you can learn my English so you can help. Guess which one I'll choose?
The same goes in reverse. There are a LOT of really cool things going on in non-English-speaking countries that I'm interested in, but it's not their job to convert all their stuff to English so I can participate. It's my job to learn their language. If I don't think it's worth the effort, then that's my choice, and my loss.
I wasn't saying that everything should be done in English, just that people shouldn't whine about how it's unfair that people in non-English-speaking countries have difficulty functioning in a largely English-speaking community of software development. If a translation of the documentation isn't available, and you want to participate... learn English. Yeah, that's really darn hard (learning any new language is hard), but that's just how reality is - it's in English, learn it or you don't get to use it. Simple.
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 20, 2007 0:02 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] just that people shouldn't whine about how it's unfair Well in this article, at least, nobody's whining about unfairness. The whining is about the loss of the work the non-English speakers could do if not for the English lanuage barrier. And it really is just whining, by the way. (Or, if you think that has negative connotations, it's pointing out a problem, not advocating a solution). I don't see anyone seriously suggesting a way to breach that language barrier that doesn't cost more than it would gain.
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 19, 2007 22:26 UTC (Thu) by riel (guest, #3142) [Link] Yeah, but Linux kernel developers would like to see more participationfrom developers all around the world.
It is not a question of "not letting some people play", it is a question
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 19, 2007 8:25 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] It's all fine and dandy to dismiss non-english speakers, but given how anglo-saxon countries (and the US-centric computer industry) resist the metric system most of the world uses that strikes me as a rather hypocritical stance.
Localisation requirements are a fact of life. Have been since biblic times. It's sheer hubris to expect they'll be solved by switching to a single language when none of the various empires in history managed to do it.
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 19, 2007 11:04 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link] > given how anglo-saxon countries (and the US-centric computer industry) resist the metric system most of the world uses
Yes, having to switch from US Letter to A4 in practically any piece of software makes me angry too. But this will pass...
> Localisation requirements are a fact of life.
There are many other ugly facts of today's life (e.g. a need to support millions of lines of COBOL). Doesn't mean this will never change.
> none of the various empires in history managed to do it.
You're wrong. _All_ empires did manage to do it. They wouldn't become empires otherwise. During a thousand years of the Roman Empire, Latin was such a language. During the years of the Soviet empire, Russian was such a language.
What you apparently mean is that none of the empires fully managed to suppress local languages/cultures (in fact, Romans didn't even try). But it's a different story.
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 20, 2007 3:05 UTC (Fri) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link] Yes, having to switch from US Letter to A4 in practically any piece of software makes me angry too.As a developer for a U.S. company I'd occasionally go to Switzerland to work with one of our customers. A few times I took a couple of boxes of U.S. letter paper with me. They needed it so when they printed our documentation, they could read the edges, and have the page breaks work out right. :-/
Paper sizes Posted Jul 26, 2007 20:22 UTC (Thu) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link] It's easy to proportionally scale US Letter documents to A4 and makes little difference to their readability. I deal with US Letter documents all the time and while I find them quite annoying it's not much fuss to work with them really.
The way every application and operating system requires you to change the paper size in three to eight different places, on the other hand, when you've already set "Australia" (or whatever) during the install... now that drives me nuts.
Paper sizes Posted Jul 26, 2007 20:31 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link] > it's not much fuss to work with them really.
Depends on the printer. All Xerox Phasers are extremely picky about page size; when it gets a request for a paper size that that isn't in its tray, it asks to load the corresponding media in the manual tray, and there is no way to force it to use A4 instead...
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 19, 2007 19:34 UTC (Thu) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link] not everyone gets to join in, and no, that ain't always fair. The article doesn't use the word "fair" anywhere, nor does it argue that this is an issue of fairness. What it says is: There is no shortage of talented developers elsewhere, but they are hard to see; they do not participate in our community at anywhere near the same level. We are clearly weaker as a result. If there are large communities of hackers that are or could be doing useful work, that isn't getting it back into mainline thanks to communication problems, then effort solving those problems could be effort well invested. And it's certainly easy to believe that this could be the case in Japan.
A Tokyo trip report Posted Jul 20, 2007 9:24 UTC (Fri) by jhs (subscriber, #12429) [Link] This is a valid point, but I think you skip over an important fact: getting interested and involved in projects that use English will improve a developer's English. We don't learn computer languages for fun, but because they are the best way of communicating with a machine. Similarly, if a developer feels a good potential with a project, he will step up and learn the human language he needs.
I personally saw this once with a Thai engineer of mine who hated English, but loved Linux (Slackware!) so much that he bit the bullet and developed his proficiency. "Love me, love my dog," he used to say.
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