Re: Debian Installer 6.0 Beta1 release (WPA support)
On Wed, Nov 03, 2010 at 11:53:23PM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote:
> [1]. Since most of the system is not translated, having a yet another
> untranslated line is not the end of the world. And I'm afraid that typical
> translations make it hard for even native users of a language to understand
> what a given menu entry means. My theory for what might be the cause
> involves ambiguities -- in English, the vocabulary is quite set, with few
> "innovations" like Microsoft's attempt to rename directory to folder, while
> in at least Polish, translators tend to choose words from a large set
> without any consistency. Heck, even such basic concepts as "file" have
> several translations -- to the point that the name I've been taught
> ("zbiór") is not recognized by some people who were taught Microsoftish
> "plik". I also remember an article in a magazine a long time ago that
> listed over 30 names for "floppy disk drive" most of which neither me nor
> any of friends I talked to would recognize as the thing.
>
> I personally gave up any attempts to use translations ~12 years ago when I
> tried to read Perl docs when sitting at a PLD machine. Even with native
> Polish and fluent Perl, I couldn't manage to understand a single sentence --
> yet after sshing to a box with English documentation everything became
> clear. Such traumatic events can leave people scarred for life.
I think that was largely uncalled for. Sure, for hackers from the 80s
who grew up having to use english to communicate with a computer, some
translation to their native language may seem odd (as they are to me),
but for a child in Africa which does not know what english is in the
first place?
Also, the two major desktop environment are very well translated as far
as I know, so there is no real gap here and "most of the system" those
users face are indeed well translated. If you want to look at kernel
printk's or some Unix server's configuration file comments - sure those
are english. But we didn't do the big effort to have d-i in Farsi for
the people who grew up on BSD.
Michael
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