Re: a few short notes

On 3-feb-04, at 14:08, Paul Robinson wrote:

>> You mean apart from the facts that it's most widely understood by
>> people, the most widely implemented in computers, and all
>> internet-relevant standards that use text rely on it?

> You mean, you and all your friends understand it, the computers you own
> understand it, and the S-centric IETF write standards with it.

No, that's not what I mean, although it's all true.

> There are
> more people in the world who understand Chinese than understand 
> English.

There are more people in the world that understand latin script than 
Chinese script. The difference is that even though very many people 
read Chinese, pretty much nobody that doesn't understands Chinese 
script. Latin script is used with the majority of all languages. 
(Although most languages use a superset, if we count accented letters 
as different characters.) Many people that don't speak a latin script 
language are still able to work with latin script to some degree.

> The fact that standards must be produced in English, is in my opinion a
> flawed aspect of the process. We should be taking an international 
> view of
> this and taking lessons from the UN in respect to translation into the
> languages over 90% of the world's population understands: English, 
> French,
> Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian.

I doubt this tallies up to 90%.

Do you have any idea about the magnitude of the down sides of this 
approach? How many languages do you speak anyway? And how much time do 
you spend communicating with people who don't speak your mother tongue?

> Internationalisation is not going to go away just because you don't 
> like it.

Maybe I don't like it because it doesn't go away... Actually just the 
word internationalization shows how flawed the whole notion is. We're 
not adopting a local phenomenon for international use, but rather the 
other way around. So it should be called localization. I must admit I'm 
not always a huge fan of this process as often the new localized 
version is inferior to the original (English) one. But I fully agree 
that people should have the option to work with their computers in the 
language of their choice.