Sacha Chua wrote:
I love discussing things with people and learning new things. Talked to pusakat, who enlightened me about the long-term usefulness of localization. Silly me. It's not a short-term thing. It's not something for the people who already use Debian or Linux (and who have no problems with English). It's for people who are going to be very new and very nervous about all of this, and they're going to find Debian much friendlier because Debian's made an effort to reach out.
It is also, in my opinion, a very good thing to support the efforts of people who are trying to keep languages spoken by relatively small groups of people alive and healthy. If this means working out how to apply that language to use with a word processor, the debian installer, or whatever, good for them! I think there is a great deal of worth in having software, and especially open source software, available in languages other than the most common ones.
I come from somewhere (Australia) that has lost literally hundreds of languages in the last couple of centuries, and we are *still* losing them. This means we are losing the diversity of thought and expression associated with all those languages. The fact that we effectively force the remaining speakers to use English whenever they use modern technology, just for lack of a useful alternative, is a great shame. I am sure the same would apply to Tagalog and many other languages as well.
Helen(who is ashamed to admit to being an English-only speaker, but who is really impressed by the efforts some in this project are making to make Things In General more accessible to non-English-speakers)