One could argue that Americans—no, I’m not going to write USanians—derive a large advantage from the fact that the default locale is their English variant. All software is understandable for them right from the beginning. They never have to wait for translations. However, in this piece I would like to argue that actually it is a disadvantage.

The Disadvantage

Why would it be a disadvantage to Americans that all software automatically suits their customs and follows their local quirks? Well, for that I would like to do a game of compare and contrast. Mostly contrast. You see, the US English strings are the only texts written by the developers themselves.

Development attracts people who like to develop, not people who like to write. They do not necessarily come from the United States, often are not native English speakers and many of them can’t see the use of arguing about -ize vs -ise, or have own opinions about it. The consequence is that the US English strings are written by people whose primary interest is writing code, not human language. This is detrimental to the quality of the texts, the suitability of the chosen phrases and spelling and grammar in general.

Translation teams, however, attract people who are interested in language. In the world of perfect localisation, all typography nuts, grammar enthusiasts and spelling bees will join together to form a team with Super Language Powers. This means that the people who will write the text you see every day on your computer are fond of language, know how to use it and have experience to say it, if you speak any language or dialect other than US English.

The Consequences

All languages—except US English—have a corrective filter between the developer’s work and the end-user. There is one community that oversees all use of language in the product. Translation teams often work with word lists, style guides and selection of contributors based on their quality. This allows them to guarantee quality, make sure that all text on the system follows the same conventions and warrant consistency across the desktop. You can correct for overuse or underuse of capitalisation, distinct between the computer and user in events by using different verb conjugations and so on.

Consistency is an important issue. For example, a computer can have a screen, a display and a view. These words are near synonyms, but the X server uses them to distinguish between three different things. It is hard enough for a user to understand what the system is talking about already, it becomes even harder when words can have different meanings in different applications. When there is no central organisation of the terminology, this does happen. Translators could correct for this by adapting the translations to the context, but Americans are out of luck.

There are no people looking after the typography, grammar, capital use and readability of US English. But there is more to localisation: translation teams also make sure that the system is using the correct date format, currency, decimal delimiter and so on. Each country has its own conventions here. No one has the job of nitpicking about the American conventions, so they’re missing a watchful eye here as well.

The result is that the US English desktop can often be inconsistent in style, word choice and spelling. This makes our product less appealing to Americans and to other people using the US English version. If we want to pursue perfection, we should not miss this out.

It has also consequences for the translations. The translations are translations of the original English texts. Although I did say earlier that translators can correct for inconsistency and bad wording, they don’t always do. It is a lot of work to manually check the context of each and every string, many translators just stick to translating every word with the same phrase. Badly used capitals and dots will often find their way into translations as well. Vague US English results in vague translations.

Solutions?

Improving the quality of US English will mean large improvements for all languages if it is done properly, by sending patches with corrections to the developers. I am convinced that we need an American ‘localisation team’, consisting of all American typography nuts, grammar enthusiasts and spelling bees who want to contribute to Ubuntu and FOSS in general. They could work together with other projects to establish conventions and methodically go through all applications to check whether they comply with these conventions.

We cannot ask from all the localisers to understand programming language and patching systems. However, with the current state of technology, I am afraid that writing patches directly for the code is the only option. In the long term, something like a POT editor and a reverse POT generator could improve things.

It would also require infrastructure. Many languages have project-agnostic communities for translation in FOSS that provide various language-related services; examples are the French Traduc and the Dutch OpenTaal. These relations are often not formalised, but they are really helpful in making sure everyone is somewhat following similar rules. As part of FreeDesktop an American initiative could be started, which could keep a list of the standard meanings and uses of words.

The solutions above are just ideas for ways to deal with a problem that we should give much more attention than we have done so far. Admittedly, it is easy for me to talk from the sideline, knowing that I—being a native speaker of the Dutch language, not of US English—will never be doing much of the work I propose. But I do hope that some people will be inspired by this piece and do something with it.

Those poor Americans deserve localisation too!

De vertaling is vooral belangrijk omdat de handleiding van het ‘Ubuntu Manual’-project zicht richt op mensen voor wie Ubuntu nieuw is, en deze doelgroep spreekt met het populairder worden van het besturingssysteem minder en minder vaak Engels. Nu kunnen ook zij deze gids gebruiken. Hoewel hij geschreven is voor Ubuntu 10.04, is het ook nog steeds erg relevant voor de nieuwere 10.10, en zal lange tijd bruikbaar blijven omdat 10.04 een LTS-vrijgave is.

Het ‘Ubuntu Manual’-project heeft door hun vernieuwende aanpak een werk neergezet dat veel beter aansluit op de doelgroep dan je anders ziet bij open-sourceprojecten. Door de toon en woordkeus is het makkelijker te begrijpen, en het gebruik van afbeeldingen vult de uitleg aan. Het document is geschikt voor afdrukken.

Ik wil bij deze ook graag de Nederlandse vertalers bedanken voor hun werk. Er zijn vele mensen die hun steentje hebben bijgedragen hieraan, maar Hannie Dumoleyn, die ook nog eindredactie heeft gedaan, Redmar van den Berg en iemand enkel bekend onder de naam ‘rob’ hebben de grootste stukken vertaald. Goed werk! Dit is een voorbeeld voor iedereen.

Je kunt het bestand downloaden op de Nederlandse pagina van het ‘Ubuntu Manual’-project.

[GUADEC2010] Neelie Kroes on open source and the importance of communities

When uploading the video I wanted to make sure that everyone, even people with hearing disabilities or people who are not so proficient in English, to understand the video. That’s why I wrote a transscript and made subtitles available in English and Dutch. I also mailed the gnome-i18n mailing list with a request for more translations and soon I got a response from Samuel Goméz who had translated the subtitles to Spanish!

This was great, but of course the process could be easier. Other people at the gnome-i18n mailing list had suggested the use of sub2po from the Translate Toolkit to convert SRT files to PO or POT files.

Now I’ve made the subtitles I’ve got available in GNOME Git in the ‘video-subtitles’ module and have requested it to be added to GNOME’s Damned Lies translation infrastructure.

What next? Although there’s only one video in the repository at the moment we need more languages! If you can help to translate Neelie Kroes’ message to GUADEC to your own language, please don’t hesitate to do so! I’ll make sure they’ll end up on YouTube.

The Video Subtitles project can also use more videos. If you’re someone who’s hosting the GNOME videos on YouTube, or somewhere else, please contact me if you want to participate.

I, for the least, will try to make subtitles for as much of the videos I’m uploading to the GUADEC YouTube channel.

I started to wonder about the use and desirableness of non-English posts on Planet Ubuntu after a comment from LoCo Council member Laura Czajkowski on my blog post Realise native English speakers are privileged. She said: We have many ubuntu members who do not post on planet.ubuntu.com as they feel it has to be in English which is unfortunate as I’d love to read them – we all can use a web translator.

That is something I personally agree with. I see Planet Ubuntu as a window into the general Ubuntu community, not necessarily just the English speaking part of it. After all, when you want language-specific content your LoCo can always provide their own Planet.

However, before bombarding the Planet with posts in a language that not everyone understands I would like to discuss this first and at the same time point at the lack of rules and guidelines there seems to be for Planet Ubuntu. We’ve seen how this can cause confusion and irritation lately when people questioned the appearance of notably Dell, but also other entities. It was their opinion that Planet Ubuntu should be for Ubuntu Members, on a personal title, only.

I’m in favour of allowing everyone to post in their favourite language on Planet Ubuntu. It would make it more useful for more people to read the planet, which would expose them to the rest of the community as well, and it would reflect the international nature of the community better. On top of that, it would allow us all to follow parts of the community that now remain ‘hidden’, by either testing our foreign-language skills, or by testing the quality of the online translation tools.

A possible downside to officially opening Planet Ubuntu for every language could be that it would be less clear what to expect when visiting it. Now people that can speak English know they can go to the planet and read everything. However, this requires mostly a change in behaviour and if people want an English-only planet they can always set one up, no?

What do you, dear (Planet Ubuntu) readers think? Do you want multilingual blog posts, like me? Or are you opposed to it? Please leave a comment.

The days of Latin and French as the lingua francas of the world are long over and we all know that English has taken its place. Especially IT is dominated by the language. Virtually all documentation and function naming is done in English, as well as almost all the communication. There are not many languages that have their own words for ‘computer’ or ‘internet’, or ‘software’ and ‘hardware’ for that matter.

It is logically, of course, to use this language now. It makes no sense to try to get everyone to learn Swedish all out of the sudden because we like that better. If you want to successfully communicate online and participate in an open source community you’ll need English. However, this is the cause of a large inequality between native and non-native speakers.

It comes clear when you take a look at what happens when you’re not a proficient English user. When your English isn’t correct:

• people will take you less seriously and treat you more like a child or an ignorant person;
• you find it harder to express yourself and to make your intentions to someone else;
• using it takes more energy and is more frustrating, meaning you’re less likely to use it;
• you’ll be more often misunderstood and/or be considered harsh, causing negative feedback;
• you find it harder to understand documentation, HowTos, blog posts and other community-vital information.

These points all discourage less fluent persons to contribute to discussions, to speak up. This is very clearly demonstrated by the relative high amount of Americans, and other contributors of English speaking countries, in the community, especially in key roles.

The United States with 300 million inhabitants is smaller than geographical Europe with 731 million people, or the EU with 501 million. Still there are many more Americans visible in the open source projects. There are only about 70 million native English speakers in Europe, from Ireland and Great Britain.

But lets start about India, Indonesia and China. All these countries have populations of less or more than one billion people. That is huge! Ubuntu also seems to be very popular there. Still we don’t see as many contributors from those countries as we see from English speaking countries.

Of course there are many factors that have to do with the diversity and origins of the community members. However, this doesn’t explain everything. India, Indonesia, Brazil and China might still be working very hard on making broadband accessible to everyone, but (Western) Europe has mostly far better internet connections than a lot of parts of Northern America.

I think that one very important reason for this is the fact that not everyone speaks good English, and for a lot of people who do speak English using it is still not as simple as using their native language. You can never learn a second language as good as your native language and it does cost a lot of energy for many people to use it when reading, writing, speaking and listening.

That is a barrier to them to contribute to the open source communities, so they stay in their LoCos or hang around a bit in the international community, but don’t do as much as they could or would like to do, because they find it costs too much energy or it too hard to learn or do because of the language. For most voluntary contributors Ubuntu is something they do in their leisure time, as a hobby. When your hobby is mostly hard and not as fun as other things you could do in the same time, it is not hard to decide not to contribute.

This is probably costing us more contributors than gender or race inequality. It is also something that is harder to solve since you can’t take away all problems by simply educating people and raising their consciousnesses. There will always remain a language barrier.

Raising consciousness does help, though. First of all I would like to make all native English speakers realise that they are in fact — every one of them, including those with dyslexia — very privileged over non-native speakers.

Secondly I would like to ask everyone in the community — also the non-native speakers — to take into account someone’s proficiency when reading a mail written in bad English. It might be tempting, unconsciously, to dismiss the email and consider the author as someone who didn’t bother to write it in proper English. However, please consider that this might be the best English of the author. Give the author a chance regardless.

Thirdly I would like to ask everyone in the community to realise how important localisation and translations are, of the interface and the documentation. Americans are very privileged that they have their whole system, from the texts in some obscure application from universe to their default currency, localised by default. They never have to adapt when a certain application is only available in US English, or when a command line calendar is following their historic conversions. Others do.

Checking the Ubuntu community

I wanted to end this post with an overview of the different councils of the Ubuntu community and the countries of origin/native languages of their members. Just read the data and consider it.

Community Council

Forum Council

IRC Council

LoCo Council

Technical Board