Re: Emacs user manual in Spanish

[Emanuel Berg]

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

> The reality is actually that the trend it going the
> other way. More and more contents are translated and
> more translations create more demand for
> translation.

Dream on. Take the Unix man pages for example.
Despite thousands of man hours put into it (no pun
intended) there is no translation even close to
matching the English original. Except for possible the
French, incidentally.

> The real deal is having quality native language
> ressources, not half backed "standard" English
> documentation written by non native speakers as is
> most often the case...

There is nothing wrong with that. On the contrary.
In the USA, all thru its history and even today, there
are tons of people using English in ways that would
make an old English tutor in Manchester blush.
But that doesn't stop the technology from benefiting
immensely from it, as well as everything else.

> As I said, your minority language point of view does
> not reflect the the reality of most major languages
> speakers all over the world. Deal with it.

There is no minority language point of view. If it is,
French is as much a minority language. A bigger
minority, yes, but still a minority.

But again, mine point of view isn't my native
language, or Swedish, because my native technology
language *is* English. My entire education, five years
of CS, was in English - lectures, books, exams, every
program or piece of documentation we ever wrote.
Tho housed in Sweden, we were always a minority among
people from all over the world. A small, but obviously
very skilled minority :)

With the natural Anglophone world, i.e. the UK, the
USA, South Africa, to some extent India, as well as
many other places, with this huge natural English
speaking world, *in addition* to all the people who
have made English their native technology language,
and granted the role the Anglophone world has played
and is playing, even the big non-English languages
like Spanish, Russian, French and so on will *never*
be able to compete in full. If you don't acquire
English, you do yourself an injustice.

If you are on a Linux system, you might know the Linux
kernel was written by a university student in Finland.
OK, originally Unix is a US thing but nevermind.
Scandinavian and continental European contributions to
Linux are *immense*. Development communication is on
the Linux kernel mailing list, or LKML.
Traffic reaches thousands of posts every week.
And every single one of them - in English.

It is also telling that you keep brining up how small
my language is. OK, so how big does the language have
to be when people don't have to bother with English?

Actually it benefits whoever and it has nothing to do
with the size of their native language.

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