Re: Emacs user manual in Spanish

[Emanuel Berg]

Jean-Christophe Helary
<jean.christophe.helary@gmail.com> writes:

> :) You speak from a minority language point of view.
> From where you stand that makes sense. There are not
> enough people who speak Swedish to create
> a technological market of ideas, hence the *need* to
> focus on English and to certainly not waste time on
> producing stuff in Swedish.
>
> It is silly to pretend it is the same for languages
> that have populations ranging in the hundreds of
> millions. Especially for linguistic communities
> where the common economic market offers very strong
> incentives to produce in that language.

It doesn't matter that more people speak Spanish than
Swedish. Because how big the Spanish-speaking world of
computers will ever be, it will never be as big as the
English ditto. For the technology person, and probably
for many other persons as well, not acquiring English
will always be a huge injustice and mistake, no matter
what nationality this person belongs to.

> You also seem to conflate technology (specs etc.)
> and it's representation in native languages
> (references/manuals). Specs use "code" that mostly
> looks like English, but it is not English.
> "find-file" of "kill-region" are not English words,
> even if they look like English. They are
> arbitrary symbols.

find, file, kill, and region are English words.
Here they are applied to denote aspects of technology.
Many times when programming the ultimate designation
eludes you. You make it as good as you are able to at
that point. Indeed, you can choose a word that doesn't
relate to the function at hand, in a language that you
just made up, or in paleo-Etruscan if so be it.
But doing so will never make your software great and
you will never reach your potential as a programmer.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573