Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 01:33:13 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: kline@tao.thought.org (Gary Kline) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <199806120133.SAA07148@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199806120102.SAA13195@tao.thought.org> from "Gary Kline" at Jun 11, 98 06:02:07 pm
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> Or then again, scholarly work is being done increasingly > by computer. I'm familiar with Thais doing translations > from Sanskrit to Thai and Manadarin, for example. What is the ISO character set standard for Linear B? The issues of multinational processing need to be left to the narrow range of applications for multinational processing, and not addressed by the vast majority of applications, which neither know nor care about anything more than a single locale. > If we limit ourselves to the computer-nerd|geek mindset > we are short-circuiting our potential. I don't think so. Nothing suggested prevents the word processor writer from expending the multinationalization effort. I will be entirely happy if my tcsh can only output "Bus Error" in only one of English, Japanese, Chinese, German, etc., at one time. I would prefer that my scrollback buffer be filled with information pertinent to the failure, and not an infinite number of translations of the error message in case I, the viewer, read only some obscure dialect of Urdlu and have been too lazy to tell the computer which language I speak. In general, computer users have a single native language. This is because, in general, humans have a single native language, and the set of computer users and the set of humans are the same set (well, except for CoCo the Gorilla, and she speaks American Sign Language, which, other than the phonetic modifications the the Utah School for the Deaf has been doggedly attempting to introduce, is pretty much stuck as a dialect of English). It would be ridiculous to localize to a "locale" for that one human somewhere who was brought up in a Chinese speaking household in Wiesbattan, Germany, so that we can display errors in the particular Creole that one human speaks. Presuming we can get someone to translate into that Creole, of course. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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