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Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. For interesting subjects, which always have global reach, the virtual conversations are conducted in English. There

Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. For interesting subjects, which always have global reach, the virtual conversations are conducted in English. There is also a place for vernacular -- it is part of people's cultural identity -- but not in a formal knowledge setting. English is a bit like Latin used to be: the language of knowledge, technology, and business. If the subject has global reach, you will miss out on the interesting bits of knowledge, simply because you are trying to do it in vernacular. Doing anything in vernacular, will just lock you up in a small and uninteresting national silo. Nothing of any interest is national. But yes, I use vernacular. I also speak it with my kids, but I don't read it -- unless it is poetry or literature -- and I don't use it in software or in business.

eropple 9y ago
> unless it is poetry or literature ...So, art? Like games?
- rasmafazi 9y ago
  Well, the more you start saying things that are closer to the truth, the more that you get downvoted by the populace, that does not want to hear it. They insist on bringing tithes and other offerings to their false gods, the Bahaal, in which they believe, and in which I don't. So, yes, there is a place for vernacular as part of your identity, and yes, it is ok to translate games for kids, but you won't be able to infinitely delay the inevitable, which is to switch to English for serious stuff.
  - Ralfp 9y ago
    You are being downvoted because you are ignorant of massive population of people who consume work of art or other, but who aren't multilangual. > it is ok to translate games for kids Big thing that lets my father (factory worker who's 50 years old, no languages other than his father's one) enjoy Playstation 4 is the fact that Sony does insane amount of work to make as much as possible translated to Polish language. The Last of Us as well as Uncharteds which in no way are games aimed for kids received full polonization. WipEout Omega Collection has been polonized as well. Same goes for 3rd parties - Bethesda's games are fully polonized (this includes Fallout's, DOOM and Skyrim), CoD's are polonized, EA's games are polonized (Mass Effect's, NFS), etc. ect. There are many adult consumers who are more comfortable with media in their native language for one reason or another. Blizzard even went as far as to declare that every game they'll release will be localized on level that would make it par on native production. They are going so far with it that they are replacing US-specific jokes with local ones.
    - rasmafazi 9y ago
      Well, in their own interest, it may be better to bite the bullet, and learn English. I ran into my own first book on programming at the end of the eighties, when I was fourteen. It was an old photocopy of Borland Turbo Pascal, in English. There was no translation available in vernacular. So, either I gave up on programming, or else I just had to get used to reading these things in English. Later on, programming became my full-time profession. If I hadn't done the effort of doing what it takes, and figure out English, today I would probably be queuing for unemployment benefits or another social handout. My kids would now be begging in the streets, instead of happily enjoying their costly private tutor and cosy private school. The kids obviously understand vernacular, but the classes are firmly in English, if only, because the other parents also know what time it is. The false beliefs and pagan gods of vernacularity make it so that the rich are getting richer, while from the poor, even the little they have, will be taken away from them.
      - cooper12 9y ago
        I don't get why you're putting English on such a high pedestal. It's just another language, and a very annoying one for those taking it up as a second language due to its lack of internal consistency. If you care so much about learning some world language, I suggest you learn and start teaching your kids Chinese since that's the country on pace to surpass the US in economy. [0] People playing these games aren't doing it to gain a marketable fluency to allow them to get a great job and prevent their family from begging (as your alternate future would supposedly have entailed). They're doing it to wind down after the end of a day, to experience something entertaining. Being forced to do it in another language is not anyone's definition of fun (instead it's alienating) and that's why despite the original game existing in English, the author mentions fan translations popping up. Btw, knowing just English will also lock you into a silo—that of the anglosphere and despite your veneration for it, it's not the end all be all of culture, nor do its tendrils reach everywhere. (for example, there's a wealth of Japanese literature that hasn't even been touched by American translators; same for so many interesting cultures in other countries) localization is a gift of culture to those who speak other languages—it's the same thing that allows Americans to enjoy French poetry, German philosophy, Korean comics, etc... Don't be so hasty to put down the whole world just to feel good about your own choices and shame those who aren't so capable or willing to jump on the Anglotrain. [0]: http://fortune.com/2017/02/09/study-china-will-overtake-the-u-s-as-worlds-largest-economy-before-2030/ http://fortune.com/2017/02/09/study-china-will-overtake-the-...
  - asveikau 9y ago
    > downvoted by the populace By and large, I don't think the populace can downvote. Careful about abstracting HN to all of humanity.
    - gtirloni 9y ago
      Additionally, using downvotes as an indication of the validity of one's theories sounds as unproductive as using upvotes.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Let people enjoy things. It is ok to enjoy things, really. Also, many people who speak well English in work, still prefer translated books and games and what not. You got downvoted not because of truth, but because you are all sanctimonious about foreign languages while we speak about game.
    - rasmafazi 9y ago
      I see. I just looked at the HTML excerpts, so, I thought it was about something generic. I am ok with translated games. I am not ok with translated math, though. It's like the localization of the glibc library. It inflates the size of the binary, while nobody that I know, would want to see vernacular in the commandline terminal. I would think of it as a bug. Time to move to musl or dietlibc!
  - eropple 9y ago
    I am a native English speaker. What you say would benefit me. Having everyone else do everything in English would be great, for me. So I neither downvoted you nor contested what you were saying because I "didn't want to hear it"; I did because your post was exclusionary and wrong.
microcolonel 9y ago
Sometimes I get i18n fatigue too. I think the world would be a better place if everyone's languages fit in ASCII. That said, the cat's kinda out of the bag. UTF-8 is at least well-done, and the algorithms are widely available. I study Japanese and have started studying Russian and Chinese; I think maybe the best way to convince people to learn English is to walk the walk. Who knows, maybe everything will go very wrong again before we get a chance to standardize. I'm also working on an engineered language with a test suite/corpus maintained alongside the language. Maybe in the ashes of the old new world there'll be room for something like this.
- douche 9y ago
  Somedays, I dream of a world where the ancient chinese were exposed to alphabaeic scripts and decided that was a good idea, instead of sticking with characters.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Though honestly, I kinda like ideographic languages. If the symbols could be enumerated in a byte and leave space for delimiters and punctuation, then I'd be down to be globally colonized by an ideographic language. Really the only difficult ones (for computers) are abugidas, abjads, and whatever thai is written in (and I suppose it is a bit of a pain to compose hangul, and still more jamo than would fit in an ASCII-sized encoding).
    - arnsholt 9y ago
      Thai is an abuguida, descended from Brahmi just like most of the rest of the South and South-East Asian scripts. It's probably the one with the most additional stuff to consider, but fundamentally it's the same kind of script.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  English doesn't even fit in ASCII. To write it properly, we need left- and right-facing single and double quotes, diareses and accents for words like naïve, façade and café, en- and em-dashes and the ellipsis. Longer documents will require symbols like † and ‡, bullets and §. The currency symbols £, €, ¢ and ₹ are used by countries where English is an official language.
nine_k 9y ago
One correction: consider Chinese. It's increasingly important, though less international.
jcranmer 9y ago
When most people play games, the goal is to relax. While I will concede that English has largely become the de facto language of trade, business, and technology, and I'm not going to go into hand-wringing because of that fact, demanding that people partake of their leisure in a language that's uncomfortable to them is several steps too far.
marvin 9y ago
There are dozens of highly-functioning economies in the world that barely use English at all. I just got back from a holiday in France, which has its own fighter jets, nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers, yet only speaks English in jobs that are directly related to foreign communications. A random person you meet on the street will be very unlikely to understand you if you speak English to them. It's a pipe dream to expect an average French person to enjoy art in its native language, and as a businessperson you will limit you market by doing this. Granted, the English-speaking world is currently the world leader in technological capability and economic power, but it's quite myopic to assume that this makes everyone else irrelevant.

eropple 9y ago

> unless it is poetry or literature ...So, art? Like games?

rasmafazi 9y ago
Well, the more you start saying things that are closer to the truth, the more that you get downvoted by the populace, that does not want to hear it. They insist on bringing tithes and other offerings to their false gods, the Bahaal, in which they believe, and in which I don't. So, yes, there is a place for vernacular as part of your identity, and yes, it is ok to translate games for kids, but you won't be able to infinitely delay the inevitable, which is to switch to English for serious stuff.
- Ralfp 9y ago
  You are being downvoted because you are ignorant of massive population of people who consume work of art or other, but who aren't multilangual. > it is ok to translate games for kids Big thing that lets my father (factory worker who's 50 years old, no languages other than his father's one) enjoy Playstation 4 is the fact that Sony does insane amount of work to make as much as possible translated to Polish language. The Last of Us as well as Uncharteds which in no way are games aimed for kids received full polonization. WipEout Omega Collection has been polonized as well. Same goes for 3rd parties - Bethesda's games are fully polonized (this includes Fallout's, DOOM and Skyrim), CoD's are polonized, EA's games are polonized (Mass Effect's, NFS), etc. ect. There are many adult consumers who are more comfortable with media in their native language for one reason or another. Blizzard even went as far as to declare that every game they'll release will be localized on level that would make it par on native production. They are going so far with it that they are replacing US-specific jokes with local ones.
  - rasmafazi 9y ago
    Well, in their own interest, it may be better to bite the bullet, and learn English. I ran into my own first book on programming at the end of the eighties, when I was fourteen. It was an old photocopy of Borland Turbo Pascal, in English. There was no translation available in vernacular. So, either I gave up on programming, or else I just had to get used to reading these things in English. Later on, programming became my full-time profession. If I hadn't done the effort of doing what it takes, and figure out English, today I would probably be queuing for unemployment benefits or another social handout. My kids would now be begging in the streets, instead of happily enjoying their costly private tutor and cosy private school. The kids obviously understand vernacular, but the classes are firmly in English, if only, because the other parents also know what time it is. The false beliefs and pagan gods of vernacularity make it so that the rich are getting richer, while from the poor, even the little they have, will be taken away from them.
    - cooper12 9y ago
      I don't get why you're putting English on such a high pedestal. It's just another language, and a very annoying one for those taking it up as a second language due to its lack of internal consistency. If you care so much about learning some world language, I suggest you learn and start teaching your kids Chinese since that's the country on pace to surpass the US in economy. [0] People playing these games aren't doing it to gain a marketable fluency to allow them to get a great job and prevent their family from begging (as your alternate future would supposedly have entailed). They're doing it to wind down after the end of a day, to experience something entertaining. Being forced to do it in another language is not anyone's definition of fun (instead it's alienating) and that's why despite the original game existing in English, the author mentions fan translations popping up. Btw, knowing just English will also lock you into a silo—that of the anglosphere and despite your veneration for it, it's not the end all be all of culture, nor do its tendrils reach everywhere. (for example, there's a wealth of Japanese literature that hasn't even been touched by American translators; same for so many interesting cultures in other countries) localization is a gift of culture to those who speak other languages—it's the same thing that allows Americans to enjoy French poetry, German philosophy, Korean comics, etc... Don't be so hasty to put down the whole world just to feel good about your own choices and shame those who aren't so capable or willing to jump on the Anglotrain. [0]: http://fortune.com/2017/02/09/study-china-will-overtake-the-u-s-as-worlds-largest-economy-before-2030/ http://fortune.com/2017/02/09/study-china-will-overtake-the-...
- asveikau 9y ago
  > downvoted by the populace By and large, I don't think the populace can downvote. Careful about abstracting HN to all of humanity.
  - gtirloni 9y ago
    Additionally, using downvotes as an indication of the validity of one's theories sounds as unproductive as using upvotes.
- watwut 9y ago
  Let people enjoy things. It is ok to enjoy things, really. Also, many people who speak well English in work, still prefer translated books and games and what not. You got downvoted not because of truth, but because you are all sanctimonious about foreign languages while we speak about game.
  - rasmafazi 9y ago
    I see. I just looked at the HTML excerpts, so, I thought it was about something generic. I am ok with translated games. I am not ok with translated math, though. It's like the localization of the glibc library. It inflates the size of the binary, while nobody that I know, would want to see vernacular in the commandline terminal. I would think of it as a bug. Time to move to musl or dietlibc!
- eropple 9y ago
  I am a native English speaker. What you say would benefit me. Having everyone else do everything in English would be great, for me. So I neither downvoted you nor contested what you were saying because I "didn't want to hear it"; I did because your post was exclusionary and wrong.

microcolonel 9y ago

Sometimes I get i18n fatigue too. I think the world would be a better place if everyone's languages fit in ASCII. That said, the cat's kinda out of the bag. UTF-8 is at least well-done, and the algorithms are widely available. I study Japanese and have started studying Russian and Chinese; I think maybe the best way to convince people to learn English is to walk the walk. Who knows, maybe everything will go very wrong again before we get a chance to standardize. I'm also working on an engineered language with a test suite/corpus maintained alongside the language. Maybe in the ashes of the old new world there'll be room for something like this.

douche 9y ago
Somedays, I dream of a world where the ancient chinese were exposed to alphabaeic scripts and decided that was a good idea, instead of sticking with characters.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Though honestly, I kinda like ideographic languages. If the symbols could be enumerated in a byte and leave space for delimiters and punctuation, then I'd be down to be globally colonized by an ideographic language. Really the only difficult ones (for computers) are abugidas, abjads, and whatever thai is written in (and I suppose it is a bit of a pain to compose hangul, and still more jamo than would fit in an ASCII-sized encoding).
  - arnsholt 9y ago
    Thai is an abuguida, descended from Brahmi just like most of the rest of the South and South-East Asian scripts. It's probably the one with the most additional stuff to consider, but fundamentally it's the same kind of script.
Symbiote 9y ago
English doesn't even fit in ASCII. To write it properly, we need left- and right-facing single and double quotes, diareses and accents for words like naïve, façade and café, en- and em-dashes and the ellipsis. Longer documents will require symbols like † and ‡, bullets and §. The currency symbols £, €, ¢ and ₹ are used by countries where English is an official language.

nine_k 9y ago

One correction: consider Chinese. It's increasingly important, though less international.

jcranmer 9y ago

When most people play games, the goal is to relax. While I will concede that English has largely become the de facto language of trade, business, and technology, and I'm not going to go into hand-wringing because of that fact, demanding that people partake of their leisure in a language that's uncomfortable to them is several steps too far.

marvin 9y ago

There are dozens of highly-functioning economies in the world that barely use English at all. I just got back from a holiday in France, which has its own fighter jets, nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers, yet only speaks English in jobs that are directly related to foreign communications. A random person you meet on the street will be very unlikely to understand you if you speak English to them. It's a pipe dream to expect an average French person to enjoy art in its native language, and as a businessperson you will limit you market by doing this. Granted, the English-speaking world is currently the world leader in technological capability and economic power, but it's quite myopic to assume that this makes everyone else irrelevant.