[FM Discuss] back from wikimania

[Delirium]

adam hyde wrote:
>  i think this is the right moment to bring up questions about
> localisation/translation...so, what i had been considering until now is
> to actually manage the languages as a 'localisation' of fm more than a
> translation. a translation of the current material might help be
> interesting to get some docs into another language, which will be useful
> in itself. however i have tried this with the dutch version of the
> manuals and i have found that unless there is someone driving the
> language, then the docs just stay there and are more of an archive than
> a living entity
>   

Part of it I think is that a project can only really succeed if it's 
servicing an active need of users, while many translation projects seem 
to be based on language-promotion concerns first, and needs of users second.

In the Dutch case, as I'm sure you're aware, the vast majority of Dutch 
internet users already speak quite good English (better than some of my 
American countrymen, really), and the biggest problem they're likely to 
face in using free software is that manuals aren't available in *any* 
language they speak. If someone whose native tongue is Dutch but who 
also speaks English wants to use software A and B, and A has only an 
English manual while B has no manual, then their most pressing concern 
is most likely to be how to use B---not how to translate the manual for 
A into Dutch, since they can already read it. A similar problem exists 
in Hindi---although there are very many non-English-speaking Hindi 
speakers, almost all Hindi *internet* users speak fluent English, 
because English is the language of the elite classes in India and the 
medium of instruction in the top universities (the IITs). This is the 
major reason the Hindi Wikipedia is largely inactive.

Even worse is when you get to smaller languages, where you attract 
nobody except language hobbyists and nationalists. If someone proposes 
starting a Navajo FLOSSmanuals, or an Interlingua one, you can bet that 
their motivation isn't to provide a useful service to users of Free 
Software who are currently suffering from a lack of manuals in their 
language.

Anyway that probably sounds a bit rant-ish, but I've hung around the 
Wikipedia discussions around language far too much. That doesn't mean 
there's no need for non-English documentation, but I think it'd be best 
at least initially to stick to languages where there is a large and 
active community of primarily monolingual internet users, like German 
and Portuguese, who could serve as both authors and readers of the 
documentation.

-Mark