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From: Josh Berkus <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Cc: Tino Wildenhain <[email protected]>
Cc: Magnus Hagander <[email protected]>
Cc: Guillaume Lelarge <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <[email protected]>
Cc: Adrian Maier <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Multi-language to be or not to be
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:20:06 -0800
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>

Magnus,

I have to say "I told you so".   When the existing translation scheme was 
built two+ years ago, I pointed out that it was cumbersome, confusing and 
inaccessable and predicted that none of our non-English communities would use 
it.

So, my vote is that whether or not we have *an* translation infrastructure, 
the current incomplete and non-standard infrastructure be junked.  It's never 
going to be used in its current form.

Further, we're going to have to expect that some language communities will 
never translate the main site, since that puts them in a position of having 
all new content generated in English and just having their site mirror that 
without the ability to add new content originating in their group.   And I 
don't think that most of our language groups are large enough to sustain both 
organizing content for their site and keeping translations of the English 
site updated.  Also, a couple of the local site groups told me that they want 
an easy-to-use CMS like Drupal, so they're not merging to our site for that 
reason.

P.S.  Josh D, you are absolutely wrong about our language composition.   The 
majority of our community speaks a first language other than English, and at 
least half of the non-English speakers aren't fluent in English.  There are 
large communities in Brazil, Spanish-speaking South America, Italy and 
Germany -- as well as Japan -- which you aren't aware of because they don't 
join the English-speaking MLs for obvious reasons.  When I used to answer 
webmaster@, for example, I got *more* questions in Portuguese than in 
English.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco

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