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Why aren’t major discussions available in English? It is not the universal feeling within the Japanese ruby community that your inability to read technical Jap
by patio11 14y ago
Why aren’t major discussions available in English?
It is not the universal feeling within the Japanese ruby community that your inability to read technical Japanese morally obligates them to spend their time translating technical Japanese into English for you. It is not the universal feeling within the Japanese ruby community that this question deserves an answer phrased that politely, either. (cough "Technical documentation written only in a foreign language? That must be tough." cough)
- davedx 14y agoGlobalization sure sets some dubious standards. Although I do speak more English than Dutch in the workplace, I would never expect it - rather, I am grateful for the allowances made for me.
- vanstee 14y agoYou're totally right. I don't think anyone should be morally obligated to translate discussions into anyone else's language. Community fragmentation caused by language differences is going to be super tough to fix. Any thoughts on a solution?
- patio11 14y agoThe traditional OSS solution to "We need X produced. X can only be produced by specialized experts. Oh no!" is either a) develop the expertise yourself, then make X or b) hire people to make X for you. Technical translators are cheap next to folks capable of writing Ruby interpreters. (I'm not intimately familiar with the field anymore, but my rough guesstimate is "A fifth the cost of them in San Francisco on an hourly basis, about a third the cost of them in Tokyo.")
- bradly 14y agoI believe Ruby core team member Aaron Patterson actually learned Japanese so that he could participate in the discussions happening in the Japanese Ruby community. This is a great example of someone stepping up on their own, instead of complaining that someone else isn't doing something for them.
- rmc 14y agoor, you can only be a ruby core member if you can speak japanese.
- prodigal_erik 14y agoIs it feasible to write Ruby without knowing English? Despite its origin, I would have thought that's the one language all users have in common, since the standard library and all the builtins use it. I suppose someone bilingual could publish a gigantic monkey-patch that renames everything, but a quick search didn't lead me to anything like that.
- mechanical_fish 14y agoMemorizing a few hundred words isn't so bad, but it doesn't get you particularly close to being able to speak English. It would be like trying to put together a Japanese conversation out of the Japanese words I already know. (Now I find myself wondering which I've memorized more of: Japanese words or Ruby keywords and names.)