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I know the blog is to help people learn English, but isn't that antithetical to helping non-English speakers learn how to use computers? Shouldn't we instead b

• heyitsnick 17y ago
  Sure, but that wasn't the point of the article. It was saying that people who have had a similar problem will post in tech forums, and they will xquote the error message in whatever language their system is in. English language tech forums will always out-number other european languages, both because of a larger user-base, and because europeans often themselves run english software themselves. However good documentation in foreign speaking languages improves, this won't change. He's recommending to someone who can manage to use English language software to go ahead; it may be uphill to start but it will be worthwhile to do it. I am English and live in a Spanish speaking country, and recently purchased a new laptop which had vista pre-installed in Spanish. My Spanish is good enough to not have problems using the software, but I know exactly what the article author is talking about, I've had this problem many times. Thankfully because i have a history with using English language windows so I can often guess the exact wording for the English translation; but others would not.
• ajuc 17y ago
  I'm Polish, and I support using native languages, but it's fact - English is the lingua franca of software. About Linux - internationalization is done right here, in normal day to day usage it isn't needed to know English, but still the problem is with troubleshouting - the easier to google error message the easier it is to solve problem, and error messages in Polish are harder to google. In old times every error presented to user had an error code, that was constant across locales. I think this is very good convention - it helps with searching for informations about error without enforcing people to use software in locale that is not their native. BTW - other good convention for error messages is to include in every error message unique string that is also dumped to logs. That way it is later easier to match stacktraces in log files with error reports from users.
  • barnaby 17y ago
    Też jestem Polakiem, ale zyję w San Francisco USA. If you post your error codes online in Polish, then others can find it in Polish... meaning you lower the barrier to entry for other Polish users (one less thing to learn). The answer is not to require everyone to use English, the answer is to post more about computers in your native tongue.
• fauigerzigerk 17y ago
  No, everybody should realise as early as possible that not knowing english is damaging their ability to participate in anything international. Not knowing english means no access to science or post graduate education, no access to international media, no access to hacker news or important blogs, no access to international job markets or even to jobs in big domestic corporations. Not knowing english correlates with being poor, uninformed and excluded. Localised UIs are evil.