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At first I was wondering why a Chinese translation had been omitted, but then I realized the service was blocked by the Great Firewall.
by w1ntermute 14y ago
At first I was wondering why a Chinese translation had been omitted, but then I realized the service was blocked by the Great Firewall.
- matthewrudy 14y agoThat's just the 1 billion Chinese in the mainland. What about the 30 million living here in Taiwan and Hong Kong?
- w1ntermute 14y agoThat's a smaller target audience than for any of the other languages they've provided translations for so far, so it makes sense that they haven't done it until now.
- Kudos 14y agoWell, except Irish ;)
- w1ntermute 14y agoIrish isn't actually available as a translation for Dropbox - they only provided an Irish translation for the announcement on that page.
- pbiggar 14y agoFunnily enough, there's probably more native Chinese speakers in Ireland than there are native Irish speakers!
- w1ntermute 14y agoHaha, I just checked and only 2.9% of the Irish population speaks Irish natively. That's pretty crazy.
- pbiggar 14y agoIt makes sense. There's barely any incentive to speak Irish, apart from Nationalism (and we've had far too much of that IMO).
- rpm4321 14y agoWhen they say natively, I think they mean as a primary language. My impression is that there's only a small percentage of people on the West Coast who speak it daily, but Gaelic used to (and may still be) required in a lot of schools as sort of a token secondary language (kind of like Latin in US Catholic schools, or Hebrew schools for Jews), and a fair amount of official government business was/is done in Gaelic. EDIT: "secure" talks about this further down the page. He says it's still taught in sort of a token way in the schools, but that he didn't run into any Gaelic in his dealings with the government.
- pbiggar 14y agoIrish person here, I can't speak much Irish and I cannot think of a situation that would ever require me to, since leaving school (though since I live in San Francisco now, its even more unlikely). We're required to learn Irish throughout school (all the way til we finish secondary school), and even need to pass Irish exams to get into university. Government business can be done in Irish, but its very rare. When you see it at the top-level, like in parliament, its almost always done for effect.
- w1ntermute 14y agoWhy is there a lack of interest in linguistic revival? Asserting independence from the UK has been a big theme in Ireland for a long time. Wouldn't re-embracing the Irish language be one prominent way of doing that?
- pbiggar 14y agoThere is an interest, which is why we are forced to learn it in school. Ironically, this forces a very large amount of the country to start to hate Irish (why are we learning this, this isn't useful, etc). IMO, making Irish optional would be a good step to making people actually want to learn it.
- Kudos 14y agoActually, there's around half the number of native Chinese speakers (~60k) as there is native Irish speakers (~120k).
- pbiggar 14y agoAh, the numbers in my head we 90k Chinese speakers and 60k Irish speakers, but I couldn't figure it out from the reports on the census. Do you have a reference I can look at?
- Kudos 14y agoIn actual census (2011) numbers, it's 15,000 Chinese speakers (presumably as a grouping) and 1.7 million Irish speakers, 110,000 of whom speak it on a weekly basis outside of education. The number of Polish speakers just about beats Irish with almost 120,000.