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by account42 678 days ago
> I'm getting that impression as well after discussing the topic of internationalization on Mastodon: using languages other than English is undervalued by open source devs. I mean, how often do you find variables named in Spanish or Russian in open source software? It's a very anglocentric bubble.

And that's a good thing.
2 comments
dcz_self 678 days ago
Why is that a good thing? I get the idea that a common language is beneficial, but the flip side is the knowledge and effort of the people who know another language. That's lost due to never being opened (I guess that's more of an indictment of the open source community being not interlinguistic).
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Zirias 678 days ago
So, let's look at this group of people knowledgeable in programming et al, but not english. Sure, this group exists. It's relatively tiny though. English is the language in any (modern, IOW except where it didn't replace latin yet) science, including CS. The vast majority of other on-topic literature is english. It's hard to learn a decent amount of stuff concerning programming without knowing english.

You can't randomly mix languages in source code, and any other choice of common language than english would exclude a LOT more people from the project.

All of this isn't related to i18n/l10n of your application at all. People not knowing english is a much more relevant factor when talking about user interfaces. I actually plan to localize my Xmoji tool eventually, it's just postponed until more important stuff is done (I mean, I assume most people would get together enough english to be able to use an emoji keyboard after all, but of course, especially seaching would benefit from l10n).

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dcz_self 677 days ago
I guess my initial reaction was wrong: not having code in non-English languages doesn't accurately represent developer sentiments. There's a lot of translation efforts in open source, but again, this is not a good proxy for the sentiment because we don't know how many translators (who care about non-English) set project direction and design protocols.

Still, an anglocentric bubble diminishes internationalization, and I disagree that it's a good thing.

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katzinsky 677 days ago
The Elinks code is in some Eastern European language.
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