[FM Discuss] back from wikimania

[Julian Oliver]

..on or around Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 04:18:24AM -0700, Delirium said:
> 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.

this is certainly true, and Hindi is a good example. 

in the case of Spanish and Chinese people however, the levels of English 
literacy would seem comparitively low, on or offline. Spanish and Brazilian
Portugese are such widely used languages that it's not uncommon for speakers
of these languages to spend a day online engaging content in their language alone.

i see it here in Spain often, something generally indicative of the broader belief
that English isn't really all that necessary to reach news, knowledge and culture: 
movies are overdubbed, every remotely popular author is translated, whether English,
Danish or Slovenian. technical documentation bookstores here in Madrid are 
impressive in scope yet there is hardly a text in English.

regardless, all this makes the assumption that internet savvy people are the
only people that will be finding and using FLOSS Manuals. if that is the case, 
it shouldn't be. recently i taught at a cultural center to people that have 
surprisingly low internet/computer literacy yet i used FLOSS Manuals as 
reference material.

more so, it's not the basic capacity to read English that is the barrier 
but the interpretation of metaphors, analogies and terms - things frequent 
in technical documentation. pictures and literal descriptions are of course 
an important vehicle here (assuming the software has a graphic component).

:wq

julian

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