[HN Gopher] FLOSS and Linguistic Diversity
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FLOSS and Linguistic Diversity
Author : BerislavLopac
Score : 28 points
Date : 2021-05-15 08:11 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.paulox.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.paulox.net)
| torstenvl wrote:
| FLOSS*
|
| This has nothing to do with oral hygiene. I honestly clicked
| through expecting to find some breakthrough study on the effects
| of oral hygiene on second language acquisition, either
| individually or sociologically.
| dang wrote:
| Fixed. Sorry. Thanks!
| severine wrote:
| Upvoted. Mods (or OP), please edit the title, the article is
| great and can bring an interesting discussion!
| danhor wrote:
| I'm not sure if more linguistic diversity will help FLOSS. For a
| lot of floss software, there isn't even enough documentation in
| English and looking at communities that tend to have resources in
| their own languages (Chinese and Japanese seem for me to be the
| main ones), there's usually a large divide to the rest of the
| English speaking floss community, which hurts both sides. For
| countries with more English speakers (e.g. most European
| countries) I don't think translations provided to developers will
| prove beneficial.
|
| For example, here in Germany a lot of mcu-related german-language
| resources are written in the mikrocontroller.net wiki. It has
| some good content, but it's often very apparent that not much has
| been updated in the last ~10 years, in many cases misdirecting
| potential beginners to less-that-optimal progression paths.
|
| You can also see a lot of people with programming experience
| switching their system to English, to easily find resources in
| case of e.g. obscure errors.
|
| The language-mastery issue is real, especially for very young
| people, but I'm not sure if "forcing" people isn't the better
| call. At least in my peer group it seems like most interested
| people became pretty adept at English and I'm not aware of any
| that gave up because of language issues (although I'm sure there
| are many examples).
|
| The suggestions for more simplified English in the article seem
| like good ideas to me. Often times the subject matter is
| complicated enough, even for people who don't have issues
| understanding the language.
| pauloxnet wrote:
| Thanks a lot for you feedback and point of view it's very
| useful for me.
|
| I reply below to some points but only to share better my point
| of view I tried to wrote in the article.
|
| > I'm not sure if more linguistic diversity will help FLOSS.
|
| I think linguistic diversity in FLOSS means a more accessible
| FLOSS world to people that not speak English.
|
| > For countries with more English speakers (e.g. most European
| countries) I don't think translations provided to developers
| will prove beneficial.
|
| But here in Europe (I'm from Italy) not all country have the
| same level English skills. I also wrote the article thinking to
| the whole World with so meny country with a low level of
| instruction.
|
| > The language-mastery issue is real, especially for very young
| people, but I'm not sure if "forcing" people isn't the better
| call.
|
| I don't think in the article I wrote about forcing people.
|
| > The suggestions for more simplified English in the article
| seem like good ideas to me.
|
| Thanks, I'm happy you found the idea good.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| > For a lot of floss software, there isn't even enough
| documentation in English and looking at communities that tend
| to have resources in their own languages ...
|
| I agree; many projects (both FOSS and non-FOSS) lack sufficient
| documentation. However, this is the case whether or not it is
| English; it is another issue.
|
| More simplified English might be a good idea. There is what is
| called Simplified Technical English, but that seems to be for
| aerospace, and perhaps it could be adapted for computer
| documentation, too.
|
| I am willing to accept contributions of documentation in any
| language whether English or otherwise for my projects, although
| I am only writing in English myself, others can write in other
| languages if they want to do. (However, I generally have no
| intention to support commands and status messages etc in
| languages other than English, nor in character encodings other
| than ASCII.)
|
| For names of stuff (and comments) in the source code of the
| program itself, I do not consider it too important to write in
| other languages, although people can try to do that if they
| want to do. At least for my own projects though, I intend to
| limit the source code to ASCII.
| pauloxnet wrote:
| Thanks a lot for your feedback.
|
| > More simplified English might be a good idea. There is what
| is called Simplified Technical English, but that seems to be
| for aerospace, and perhaps it could be adapted for computer
| documentation, too.
|
| I'm happy that you think that the idea in the article is
| good.
|
| I didn't know about the "Simplified Technical English" it
| seems interesting.
| hirundo wrote:
| There could be automated linguistic diversity in the code itself,
| rather than just the docs.
|
| Say, you must pick identifier names from a subset dictionary of
| language concepts (pruned of synonyms and multiple senses), for
| which we have translations into X other languages. E.g.
| WidgetFactory is a valid name, since we can translate that, but
| FoznozzleBodega raises an error. So the resulting code can be
| trivially output in any language in the master dictionary.
|
| There could also be multilingual literary programming by making
| the output syntax conform to the target language as well, in
| terms of conjugation, part of speech order, etc.
|
| Code is a relatively low hanging fruit for debabelization.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Word-by-word translation doesn't really work, unfortunately,
| even in the limited context of variable names. You'd have to
| translate for example MoveTime into MoverTiempo, which is
| awkward in general and the wrong translation entirely if the
| variable refers to a time that someone's moving house.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Current output l10n tends to translate whole strings in
| context. It sounds like your preference is to make automatic
| translation part of every binary? Maybe I'm misunderstanding
| you, but I don't think that is the best way to go about
| achieving localization, given the massive overhead and
| lackluster results.
| geofft wrote:
| I like this idea. It seems like it's related to another idea
| that I've always liked but never seen in practice: assuming
| that the code checked in always parses, you can re-lay-out code
| style (indentation, tabs/spaces, line length) according to the
| individual developer's preferences upon checkout, and transform
| them back to some (arbitrary) standard upon checkin.
|
| Git can handle this sort of thing with smudge/clean filters.
| corty wrote:
| GUI translation works like this, usually. You have a list of
| strings/phrases occuring in the GUI and a translation table for
| each language that assigns the english string to its translated
| equivalent. With the help of a dictionary (general and domain
| specific parts) you can even do automatic translations.
|
| But the devil is in the details: Most english speakers don't
| know foreign languages, so they are unaware of lots of problems
| that occur from just a word list. E.g. there is a difference
| between "end" as a noun and "end" as a verb. In German, one
| would translate the former as "Ende", the latter as "beenden".
| So for the string table, the programmer would need two
| different annotated entries "end (n)" and "end (v)" for the
| translation to be correct. But usually, the translation team
| only gets "end" without context, annotations or anything, and
| of course all occurences of "end" will be conflated into one
| line in the translation table. There are other frequent
| problems, like sentences containing numbers that require logic
| to get right and distinguish between Singular/Plural, nothing
| and maybe even Dual cases. Or the problem that designers got
| their fingers into a GUI, leaving just enough room for English
| language strings, but the translations will be cut off or
| awkwardly skew the layout because they are too
| short/overflowing/unaligned.
|
| This frequently leads to the situation where as a German, I
| have to translate to English and back to understand the
| meaning. Which is why I nowadays avoid translated software and
| do everything in English. I think translation without lots of
| effort is pointless. And nobody will invest any significant
| effort into "small overseas markets".
|
| In FOSS it may be easier to get good translations because of
| the feedback from real users. They are often more proficient in
| the target language (than paid translators) and can recognize
| awkward phrasings and misleading situations. Translation is
| also an opportunity for small incremental improvements by tons
| of otherwise non-technical volunteers.
|
| But for the aforementioned reasons, automatic translation makes
| things worse, not better. I have yet to find a useful
| translation of technical content, i.e. anything that goes
| beyond just understanding the general topic of a newspaper
| article.
| [deleted]
| pauloxnet wrote:
| Hi @BerislavLopac, I'm Paolo Melchiorre the author of the
| article, and thanks for sharing
| xupybd wrote:
| This is a hard problem to solve. The amount of work required is
| huge. I understand the problem. I work on Italian CNC machines.
| Half my time debugging is in Google translate trying to figure
| out comments, variable names and error messages. I don't think
| it's impossible to translate all of the material to English but
| it would cost hundreds of thousands. I Know FOSS doesn't have the
| same economic model but it does have opportunity costs. If
| someone wants to advocate for this great, I'd be cautious to ever
| disparage a project for not doing this. Simply because it is a
| tremendous amount of work.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Is translation really that expensive? Once they're in a
| spreadsheet there are plenty of services which will translate
| them.
| pauloxnet wrote:
| Unfortunately it is not like that. We experienced various
| difficulties translating only few sections in the Django
| documentation because, also for technical text, mechanical
| translation is not effective, but you have to adapt the text.
| pauloxnet wrote:
| Hi, thanks for your feedback. My suggestion in the article was
| more to take care of all people in the community than to
| translate everything. Starting to use a better/simpler English
| would be a great starting point.
| WalterBright wrote:
| In the 80s I worked pretty hard to support multiple languages
| with the Zortech C/C++ compiler. Error messages were switchable
| between English, German, French and Japanese. Translated versions
| of the manual were made.
|
| The trouble was, I had to hire translators. They weren't
| programmers, so the translations were (so I've been told)
| peculiar. When I'd modify the compiler, trying to keep the
| translated text in sync was a nightmare.
|
| The last straw was when I found out that essentially none of our
| customers used the messages in their native language. They
| preferred the English versions.
|
| So I just gave up on that with D. (Although the D language itself
| has excellent Unicode support, the user interface is all in
| English.)
|
| Some members of the D community have taken the initiative to
| create documentation in their native languages, which is great.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Interesting story! Thanks for sharing.
|
| I'm consistently impressed by Microsoft's approach to
| translation - their online database of annotated translations -
| is an invaluable source for translating and just talking about
| computer/software stuff in non-english languages. (
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/language they made their entire
| translation database available online).
|
| I do some work on a compiler and as much as I'd like to enable
| people to use it to teach young schoolkids in their native
| language (with localizable keywords + error messages), the
| implementation/maintenance burden would be massive and then
| people wouldn't be able to share source code so easily
| globally.
|
| It's hard to balance - I like languages, and usually my code
| isn't in English, but...yeah, I can only go so far in practice.
| pauloxnet wrote:
| Thanks a lot for sharing your experience it's really great to
| learn more about FLOSS and its community.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There were some fun moments in this. In attempting to
| translate "destructor" to Japanese, we'd get "death tractor".
| Now, personally I felt that "deathTractor" was a far more
| apropos term than "destructor" (sorry Bjarne). For years my
| circle of colleagues called them deathTractors.
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