
Show HN: I2018n – Internationalisation in 2018 - peterburkimsher
http://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/
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yorwba
Some criticism: in the graphs, you used the word 揚聲器, which means
"loudspeaker" (I can't actually read traditional characters, but the 器 was a
dead giveaway). I'm not a native speaker, but I'd use 说（母语）者 to refer to a
(native) speaker. The Russian translation has the same problem: динамиков
isn't used to refer to humans. [1] I can't read Arabic at all, so I couldn't
check, but I guess the translation is wrong as well. I suggest not using
automatic translation if you can't sanity-check the result, unless it's
absolutely necessary. When in doubt, Wiktionary is pretty good for
disambiguating word senses. [2]

I'd also prefer if you didn't use "dialect" to describe differences in
spelling or alphabet (those can be related to dialects, but are more often a
product of political boundaries) as well as between completely different
languages. In particular the dialect of Mandarin spoken in Shanghai is
relatively easy to understand if you speak some other dialect, but
Shanghainese usually refers to a language in the Wu language family, which is
absolutely incomprehensible for Mandarin speakers.

Other than that I found this to be an interesting article.

[1]
[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/динамик#Russian](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/динамик#Russian)

[2]
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/speaker#Translations](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/speaker#Translations)

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peterburkimsher
Thank you for the reply!

I only speak English and French, so I just used Google Translate to label the
axes. I thought it would look more international that way. Apparently that was
a bad idea.

Shanghainese is referring to the language, which Wikipedia says are often
called "dialects".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese)

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yorwba
The Wikipedia article uses scare quotes because labeling them dialects is not
linguistically correct. It's like calling French a dialect of Latin. It's only
widespread because most people don't know enough about Chinese languages to
understand the difference.

