[FM Discuss] back from wikimania

[Delirium]

Julian Oliver wrote:
> 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.
>   

Yeah that makes sense to me, and I wasn't opposing the concept of 
translation in general. If there's a large demand for documentation in a 
language, then it seems more likely that there can be a vibrant 
community of people producing it and filling a real need. It's just that 
if you open things up completely there's a danger of starting project 
just because someone feels there "should" be stuff in a language, even 
if nobody really is looking for it.

I still do think that producing good manuals at all, in any major 
language, is probably the bigger issue... for myself, some programs are 
so poorly documented that I'd be happy to find a good manual in even a 
language I don't speak, since a Babelfish translation of a German manual 
would be an improvement on the current state...

-Mark