Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
blog.szynalski.com
Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
1–10 of 65 posts
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#2I'm from Italy and I have a macbook with italian keyboard. Still I switched to the english layout because software and usability is designed for english people and english keyboards.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#3I'd go as far as to say everyone should just move to English for everything, not just Operating Systems.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#4I'd go as far as to say everyone should just move to English for everything, not just Operating Systems.
I agree. For instance, by using Gmail in English you get all the new stuff first.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#5So I got a Mac.
Now seriously: that's not a real reason to use the whole system in English. I do that (except for the keyboard layout, I love the Spanish one <3), but I don't think I anyone should ever do it if they don't really like/feel comfortable to. Translations are very good, so that wouldn't be a reason... and IMHO what the post describes is an acceptable risk (hey, you probably will get sorted of this, but will have to Google more than a few minutes).
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#6I'd go as far as to say everyone should just move to English for everything, not just Operating Systems.
I speak two languages: English and Russian. Though it drives me crazy when I have to use software and especially cellphones in Russian - I can't understand anything there.
I'd say, everyone needs to know English, but I wouldn't like if majority switched to English as their only language. In my opinion, other languages help us to learn history of their countries.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#7Summary: human languages have network effects too, and using one of the more popular ones may have benefits.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#8This is why my company decided to go with a logging/messaging mechanism that stores messages by ID with parameters. We can get a log file from customers in France who see the error message in French, but we can read their log file in English because it's in a neutral format.
This isn't a panacea, as it means that there's a bit more work involved to integrate with tools like Splunk, and we obviously don't log to anything like syslog. But it makes it easier for our support people to support customers who prefer to see their messages in their native language.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#9Heh, I moved to Poland three months ago from my native England, and the one thing that's really helping me with the language is setting my Windows installation to be in Polish.
Note: I guess this step isn't necessary if, unlike me, you don't suck at learning languages ;)
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#10Actually you should switch to software that keeps localization in configuration space instead of code, allowing you to switch languages on a per-user, per-program or per-session.
Having user-targeted messages hard coded is a bug.