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Date:      Fri, 12 Jun 1998 20:08:30 +0200 (MET DST)
From:      Nick Hibma <nick.hibma@jrc.it>
To:        Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD hackers mailing list <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: internationalization
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.3.95q.980612193741.19080a-100000@elect8>
In-Reply-To: <199806121738.KAA13739@usr02.primenet.com>

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    > > Could someone translate this into a language called English? Some people
    > > on this list are non native speakers of English, like myself, and have
    > > a 'syntax error' or 'decoding error' on the fragment below.
    > 
    > If you could give a specific fragment, I could "translate" it for
    > you; the "fragment" you attached was rather large: a whole message.
No thanks, my English is well^H^H^H^Hgood enough. :)

    > A translation would be too large for this list, especially given
    > the fact that it would be a repost of the same information, and that
    > the information itself is dangerously close to being off topic,
    > like this post.  8-).
Oh well, let's climb the barricades then.

    > Discussions of highly technical issues require *precise* language.
    > This is why all highly technical fields develop their own jargon.

Highly technical, as in: ilk, bigotry, premise? :-) Nope, that was an
excursion into the land of poetry and was definitely not within the
jargon of the topic being discussed.

I was referring to 
	'some ilk' vs. 'some sort'		(fancy language)
rather than
	"Why cannot we support _both_ the ISO and Unicode paradigms."
						(jargon)

A small child will have no difficulty with the Dutch phrase 'Save File'
to save a file, it is appropriately used 'jargon'. Some people,
Microsoft for example make the mistake of translating this into 'Bestand
Opslaan', which makes it incomprehensible for me _and_ changes the
keyboard shortcut. This change moves the language away from jargon and
makes life more difficult (for me). Using jargon improves the
readability as you say.

    > For comparison, consider someone wanting/usr/src/sys/i386/i386/locore.s
    > be written in C instead of 386 assembly so that more people could
    > understand it.  It could probably be done, with a small number of
    > inlines, but it would not be very efficient to do it.
Another example: writing Apache in C++.

But, let's stop the thread before someone finds a way to attach a hammer
object that just knows how to hit you to an e-mail.


Nick Hibma

P.S.: It's Feierabend. I go for a gin&tonic.


STA-ISIS, T.P.270, Joint Research Centre, Italy
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