Language is a barrier for children of all ages
On Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 04:12:45PM +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Tuesday 28 November 2000, at 10 h 18, the keyboard of Ben Armstrong
> <synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca> wrote:
>
> > It was suggested that by the
> > time children are nine, they are perfectly capable of navigating around
> > the "full" Debian menu so there is no need to cater to the nine-and-older
> > age range.
>
> Except for the language: it doesn't seem children under 12 or 13 deal
> easily with english.
Good point. Of course whatever is true of children for whom english is
not their native children who are 9-12 is going to be even more of an
issue when it comes to ages 8 and under. So anything that Debian Jr. does
for the younger kids for language support benefits the older
automatically. Also, language is an issue for Debian as a whole, not just
Debian Jr (although it is one of our stated goals). So yes, the language
problem needs to be addressed, but as a tangential issue which will
necessarily involve other subgroups of Debian and is not restricted to any
particular age range.
On this topic, I guess an active role that Debian Jr. can take in the
process of i18n is to have a heightened awareness of the problem and to
seek assistance upgrading our packages with translations wherever
possible.
What mechanism is there in place within Debian for developers to obtain
translations to put into their packages? Is this normally a
developer-initiated thing? A user-initiated thing? A
debian-i18n-group-initiated thing? I think the largest stakeholders in
finding a solution for this problem (I know a number of our members are in
nations where english is not the native language of many children) should
approach debian-i18n and/or debian-devel with some of these questions
and convey to us your findings. Without this guidance, I don't know where
I would begin with my own packages.
Ben
--
nSLUG http://www.nslug.ns.ca synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca
Debian http://www.debian.org synrg@debian.org
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