[Mageia-discuss] What is your motivation? (about American English in Mageia for British users)

[RICHARD WALKER]

On 25/07/2012, Morgan Leijström <fri at tribun.eu> wrote:
> The system source and interface must be written in *one* consistent
> language.
>

I'm not sure I understand the imperative. If I were a native speaker
of Spanish I would probably prefer to write my code in Spanish.
Indeed, back in the days when most freely available programs were
published as source code in magazines, I had great fun typing programs
from Spanish magazines into my ZX Spectrum. Of course, any text which
would be displayed to the user I preferred to translate into English.

Surely it is a similar problem when the "program" is a whole operating
system. If I expect my users to be of many nationalities then I would
also expect to have to do some translating. The consistency of which
you speak comes from having the translations expected by the
population of users.

> And the fact is that the most common used language in the system is en_US
>
> Therefor it should be purified to *en_US*
>
> And all other en_* should be translations.

Again we seem to differ. I hope you didn't mean "purified", that's
probably just a mis-translation where something like "rationalised" or
"simplified" might have been a better choice. Where we really differ,
though, is in regarding all languages (with the exception of the US
variant of English) as being targets for translation. I would not
discriminate against our trans-atlantic cousins in that way. I would
include their language as a valid target for translation and then we
would all be equal.

>
> Also read the bug linked in Marjas post
>

Yes, I have read it before. I even had a discussion along similar
lines a few years back on a Mandrake or Mandriva forum. It just
underlines the different approaches to the subject taken by
programmers and users (although I am sure there is some blurring round
the edges). Programmers are not necessarily linguists. Those who are
are may not have English as their native language. I suppose if we
were debating whether Castillian or Latin American Spanish should be
the default with the other requiring translation then I too might
wonder at all the fuss. Surely it couldn't matter to castellanos that
they must conform to Central & Southern America norms, could it?

Sensitive cultural and social use of language is much too complex a
subject for people who focus on logic to understand, especially in a
foreign language.

>
> Or why not write all in lojban ;)
>
> /Morgan

Now you are getting the idea! Bravo.