Dear Sirs,
Although I do realize that you must receive hundreds (if not thousands) of emails per week, I simply had to try my best to get a message through, which I truly hope you’ll read.
Firstly, I love Debian. I love the distro itself, its community, its underlying beliefs… geez, I even love its color-scheme!
What I do find utterly preposterous is your website’s so-called Portuguese version.
Although I appreciate the efforts in trying to translate “truck-loads” of information into Portuguese (which is my mother tongue), I think you should be aware that the text, syntax, semantics, grammar and overall spelling are truly awful. Even worse, despite constantly changing the language back to English, I keep on being redirected to the “Portuguese” version of the website, which can be truly annoying and might frustrate the expectations of people in a similar situation. Personally, I’m starting to avoid the website because of that, which is a shame.
I know that the person reading this – hopefully reading, I should say – most likely isn’t Portuguese. I’m certainly not blaming anyone. Like I said, I appreciate the colossal effort behind all of it. However, please be aware that this particular situation denigrates Debian’s image.
To sum up, my main complaints are, as follows:
- The website sais it’s in Portuguese, which is redundant, since it does not specify if it’s from Portugal or from Brazil;
- From reading it, any Portuguese-speaking visitor perfectly identifies it as being Brazilian Portuguese (which should be specified, nonetheless);
- I’m from Portugal, but please note that I’m already taking into consideration the slight differences and spelling peculiarities which characterize Brazil’s Portuguese;
- Some of the mistakes are truly painful to read, which might lead one to assume it was written by a twelve year-old (harsh, I know, but true nonetheless);
- I’m beginning to convince my firm to implement Debian for general office use, but feel that it will not offer any credibility once my partners read the website;
- For what it’s worth, I’m a legal practitioner in my home country, specialized in international law, an information which I hope renders my criticism well-founded;
- I practically have no spare time to myself, but if you need some sort of proof-reader (or even translator) for Portuguese from Portugal, I will gladly give back some of the dedication that the Debian developers have offered us over the years, without ever asking for anything in return.
Thank you for reading this, for your hard-work and for a wonderful distribution.
Yours respectfully,
Miguel Oliveira Martins