Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software • Hacker News Board

Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software

#51

Post by shiranaihito » Fri, Jan 08, 2010, 7:19 PM UTC

mootothemax wrote: post #9

Heh, 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 ;)

You, sir, are a Jolly Good Fellow :) It's nice to see an English person bothering to learn a foreign language. Besides, you must not suck if you can survive using a Polish Windows.

How did you end up moving to Poland, by the way?

Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software

#52

Post by ajuc » Fri, Jan 08, 2010, 7:28 PM UTC

barnaby wrote: post #38

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 be contributing to non-English documentation so that even those who are too poor to learn English, can still learn to use a computer? Ubuntu is doing this beautifully.

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.

Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software

#53

Post by xpaulbettsx » Fri, Jan 08, 2010, 7:38 PM UTC

halostatue wrote: post #8

This 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 anyth…

On Windows, if you use the new manifest-based Event Log APIs, it will automatically translate Event Log messages for you based on the language (you provide the actual translations in the manifest of course, Event Log just knows how to decode the correct one). IT Admins who open up a log generated on a French-language machine will see the messages all in English, not French.

Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software

#54

Post by ajuc » Fri, Jan 08, 2010, 8:32 PM UTC

oscardelben wrote: post #2

I'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.

In Eclipse IDE almost every Polish accented character "Alt + l, s,c,o,..." is made into keyboard shortcut, so every time I create a new workspace I have to manually change these shortcuts to other, not colliding with my language.

And we do translations with Eclipse, so local characters are important.

But that's the way it is, at least we don't have two kinds of I letter, like some ohter countries :)

Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software

#55

Post by herdrick » Fri, Jan 08, 2010, 8:55 PM UTC

halostatue wrote: post #14

rbanffy wrote: post #10

Actually 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.

Yes, it is. However, if you don't include search keys in the text presented to the user, it isn't going help when you get a dialog that says (FTA): Sterownik ekranu przestał działać, ale odzyskał sprawność. That's missing something at the beginning or end that allows a search engine to say "aha! this is looking for this error message, which in English is this ". This is a hard problem, at the same time; the translate…

Actually this is something the search engines can and should do. Offering this on Bing would be a very smart thing for Microsoft to do. They'd have a nice little competitive advantage from their easy access to the bundles of localization strings. (I doubt if it'd slow Google down much, but even if Bing were the best search engine to use for only a few days after the release of a new MS product that would really help them to get people to try Bing.

Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software

#56

Post by zyb09 » Fri, Jan 08, 2010, 10:48 PM UTC

This is very true. I actually try to reverse translate lots of error messages back to English when googling for help. It's not always easy to get the correct wording however.

Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software

#57

Post by eru » Fri, Jan 08, 2010, 11:21 PM UTC

neonscribe wrote: post #44

eru wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. German was also very important in science at the end of the 19-th century.

And French was the language of diplomacy from the 17th century until WWII. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

I guess Chinese should have been quite important in east Asia (and getting important again right now)? Any experts on that around here?

Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software

#58

Post by barnaby » Sat, Jan 09, 2010, 12:09 AM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #52

barnaby wrote: post #38

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 be contributing to non-English documentation so that even those who are too poor to learn English, can still learn to use a computer? Ubuntu is doing this beautifully.

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 pre…

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.

Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software

#59

Post by c00p3r » Sat, Jan 09, 2010, 5:30 AM UTC

What is really better - is to set up google search preferences to search in English language, instead of auto-detected by GEO-location or your browser's language settings.

You will be surprised by the huge difference in search results when you forces google to search only in English.

Also try to read English language news instead of your native. You will discover, that world is much bigger than those biased and poorly translated articles you can found on a popular localized sites.

Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software

#60

Post by Loic » Sat, Jan 09, 2010, 8:59 AM UTC

Interesting that for debugging purpose only, the author considers that one should use the software stack in English only. I am sorry, but the wonder of humanity is coming from our differences. I speak French, German, English and Danish, each language allows me to think/reflect on different themes differently. I can express some concepts in German with one word for example "Schadenfreude" which would require a complete sentence in French.

Now imagine, you are deep into doing some work in German and you need to switch all the time between your "German" work and your "English" tools because your computer may crash and you may need to copy/paste an error message in a search engine. This is a usability disaster. I am really surprised that lot of HN readers are supporting such idea when at the same time the majority of people here have high praise for good design and usability.