Re: Localized Pages

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Felipe Contreras wrote:

> > I wouldn't say that "most" people don't like this. In my experience, it
> > is only a relatively small group that purely detest their mother tongue
> > being used instead of English in technical writing. But this group is
> > often the loudest ;-)
> >
> > These users that don't want information in their own language are also
> > very rarely novice users -- so if www.gnome.org is at all aimed at
> > novice users, it should include some language selection mechanism that
> > is automatic, provides a "smart" default and is overridable if the user
> > wants that. I think only the content-negotiation language selection as
> > default and an optional language selection method on the page that
> > overrides that (and with this info stored in a cookie) provides all this.
>
> First of all, I hate to see my mother tongue being used instead English in
> web pages, it seems weird, that's simply because most people learn to use
> computers in english,

<RANT>
Some people see it that way. I prefer to think about it as more freedom; 
that is, since translations exist, you can choose whatever language you 
want the information in. I also think that using the user's native 
language/locale as default is a wisely chosen default, since assuming 
that the user will understand his/her own language the best seems 
natural (he/she might not even know another language).

Personally, I think that just because people in the past have been 
forced to learn English to be able to use computers or surfing the web 
doesn't mean that it has to be that way. Don't misunderstand me, I love 
learning languages and I think that everybody who has the possibility to 
do that should do so, just that I think it's sad that it should be a 
requirement for using and benefitting from technology.
</RANT>

There you had it. My opinion in a nutshell ;-P


> however it would be a nice feature to have the GNOME
> site in different languages, but think, does the whole site will be
> translated? it will be hard to translate all the news, developer info, etc.

Yes and no. Of course, translators are merely humans, and I don't think 
anyone will like or manage translating ever-changing news.
That's why I think that trying to translate gnotices is a dead end, but 
I think the rest should be absolutely fine to translate. I haven't 
checked the developer documentation, but it might just be that some of 
them already have translations. Anyway, there are *a lot* of gnome 
translators, so I think that at least some translation teams will manage 
to make gnome.org translations 100% for their respective languages.


> Also it's very hard to translate technical terms, and anyway seems so
> strange that Enlish is clearer.

Yes, translating technical terms and documents is a hard job. But we 
already do that today. Why should translating the web site for software 
be any harder than translating the very software itself, like we do today?


> Plus all that you have to know that some languages like spanish are very

> different depending on the country.

Yes. Sadly, browsers often only give information about language and not 
locale, so there will have to be some guessing in the default. But I 
think this is a minor issue, since there aren't even language teams for 
all country variations of languages. For example, there is only one 
Spanish team (I think), but I also think inter-language differences is a 
very minor problem compared to the difference between Spanish and 
English. :-)


> Well, I'm talking about my personal experience with spanish from Mexico, it
> might be different for ohter languages.

Always nice to hear experiences :)


Christian