Date: Thu, 21 Mar 1996 09:16:29 +0100 (MET) From: Thomas Gellekum <thomas@ghpc8.ihf.rwth-aachen.de> To: chuckr@Glue.umd.edu (Chuck Robey) Cc: FreeBSD-chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <199603210816.JAA25792@ghpc6.ihf.rwth-aachen.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.91.960320134050.5504C-100000@gilligan.eng.umd.edu> from Chuck Robey at "Mar 20, 96 01:47:26 pm"
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Chuck Robey wrote: > I am just a little puzzled on one point. In ports, we have a healthy > sized couple of sections dedicated to ports that have been handcrafted > for Russian and Japanese FreeBSDers. I was thinking about this, and I > occurred to me that probably the largest group of FreeBSDers with a > non-English home tongue would be the Germans. How come there is no > German section? Are a very large number of Germans content with English > programs, or is the interest not there, or are these things showing up on > different venues? For me, there's no need for a German section in ports. I have set LC_CTYPE=de_DE.ISO_8859-1 which does most of the i18n I want: recognizing umlauts as type alpha. Once I had LANG set, but after I got `Kein Treffer' from tcsh for the first time I changed that on the spot. I'm simply not used to getting German (error) messages. I can't parse them, I have to (try to) re-translate them into English (`No match' in this case (``kein Streichholz'')). Actually, this goes much beyond program output. The lingua franca in the (computer) world is English, like it or not. All technical terms are English. Trying to read a book in German, (original or translated) will leave you fighting with words you've never heard, literally translated back from English. The resulting language is quite disgusting and harder to read than English (for me, at least, even though my English is not good). tg
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