

Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software - tszyn
http://blog.szynalski.com/2010/01/08/english-versions-of-software/

======
halostatue
This is why my company decided to go with a logging/messaging mechanism that
stores messages by ID with parameters. We can get a log file from customers in
France who see the error message in French, but we can read their log file in
English because it's in a neutral format.

This isn't a panacea, as it means that there's a bit more work involved to
integrate with tools like Splunk, and we obviously don't log to anything like
syslog. But it makes it easier for our support people to support customers who
prefer to see their messages in their native language.

~~~
yardie
Why would your customers even need to see the log file? For general errors we
have a language table that spits out the local copy to the screen. Common
errors are translated (~100). Behind the scenes, the logs are in english for
internal errors, and the language of the OS for everything else. We rely on
.NET so exceptions are tied to the OS.

We have some older components that do spit out error codes. (like COMS, error
-84413994005!) Sometimes the codes aren't specific at all and I have to
install a debug version to get the information I need, or rely on a graybeard
programmer to help me out.

These days programs are far too complex to rely on a limited set of error
codes.

~~~
halostatue
Our logs aren't just error messages; they're all sorts of messages that the
user of our (backup) software may be interested in. I'm trying to figure out
ways to _reduce_ our messages so that our customers only see the details that
they will really be interested in, but there is a large subset of our
customers who want to be able to review how their backups went (and not just
with the email summary that we send, which is generated from the log messages,
BTW).

Our _tracing_ facility, on the other hand, is purely English.

~~~
yardie
Okay, just a difference in semantics. In that regards our systems are similar.
Our reports = your logs, our logs=your traces.

------
barnaby
I know the blog is to help people learn English, but isn't that antithetical
to helping non-English speakers learn how to use computers?

Shouldn't we instead be contributing to non-English documentation so that even
those who are too poor to learn English, can still learn to use a computer?
Ubuntu is doing this beautifully.

~~~
ajuc
I'm Polish, and I support using native languages, but it's fact - English is
the lingua franca of software.

About Linux - internationalization is done right here, in normal day to day
usage it isn't needed to know English, but still the problem is with
troubleshouting - the easier to google error message the easier it is to solve
problem, and error messages in Polish are harder to google.

In old times every error presented to user had an error code, that was
constant across locales. I think this is very good convention - it helps with
searching for informations about error without enforcing people to use
software in locale that is not their native.

BTW - other good convention for error messages is to include in every error
message unique string that is also dumped to logs. That way it is later easier
to match stacktraces in log files with error reports from users.

~~~
barnaby
Też jestem Polakiem, ale zyję w San Francisco USA.

If you post your error codes online in Polish, then others can find it in
Polish... meaning you lower the barrier to entry for other Polish users (one
less thing to learn).

The answer is not to require everyone to use English, the answer is to post
more about computers in your native tongue.

------
ptn
That's why I write my code (var and function names, comments) in English.
First, it meshes nicely with the rest of the language, keywords specially.
Second, the most important docs, books, forums, wikis, mailing lists, etc are
in English.

~~~
yardie
I wouldn't say the most important stuff is. Definitely the latest stuff is
available in English first. For software it can be a few months. For books it
can be a difference in years, and that's if you can find the translated
version at all.

------
oscardelben
I'm from Italy and I have a macbook with italian keyboard. Still I switched to
the english layout because software and usability is designed for english
people and english keyboards.

~~~
ajuc
In Eclipse IDE almost every Polish accented character "Alt + l, s,c,o,..." is
made into keyboard shortcut, so every time I create a new workspace I have to
manually change these shortcuts to other, not colliding with my language.

And we do translations with Eclipse, so local characters are important.

But that's the way it is, at least we don't have two kinds of I letter, like
some ohter countries :)

------
rbanffy
Actually you should switch to software that keeps localization in
configuration space instead of code, allowing you to switch languages on a
per-user, per-program or per-session.

Having user-targeted messages hard coded is a bug.

~~~
halostatue
Yes, it is. However, if you don't include search keys in the text presented to
the user, it isn't going help when you get a dialog that says (FTA):

    
    
      Sterownik ekranu przestał działać, ale odzyskał sprawność.
    

That's missing something at the beginning or end that allows a search engine
to say "aha! this is looking for _this_ error message, which in English is
_this_ ".

This is a hard problem, at the same time; the translated log files[1] from
work look something like this:

    
    
        2009-12-13 14:21 BACK-E-00234 <text here, with optional parameter values>
    

The key piece is "BACK-E-00234" (it's from the BACK module, it's an Error, and
it's message 00234). When we have messages to display to the user in a dialog,
we _don't_ show that key information (or have a way of getting to it) because
it's ugly.

It's unlikely that the message mentioned in the article was hard-coded to
Polish; instead the author is arguing about users and the searchability of
non-English error messages. To increase the searchability, you need to include
key details (e.g., "BACK-E-00234") that make the message significantly uglier
to read. One possible way around this is to make sure your error dialogs are
selectable/copyable (maybe put a button to do this), but on copy silently
insert the search key details.

[1] Our untranslated log files look more like:

    
    
        <M ID="234" T="2009-12-13T14:21:00.00000" S="E" M="BACK">...parameter tags here...</M>

~~~
rbanffy
Hmmm... Including a button on dialog boxes for googling (or bing'ing) the
error in language-neutral form...

Nice item for a future GUI wishlist.

~~~
halostatue
I'm not sure that a button for search is the right way to go; it would work,
definitely, but at the cost of cluttering your UI. Insertion into copy is
probably a better idea, because you may be emailing the error message to a
systems administrator instead of searching it.

~~~
rbanffy
Perhaps a collapsed details or additional actions pane

------
Jencha
Hard to agree as people from other countries may poorly understand English.

That's a big problem to learn computer in foreign language (If you had context
menu with items: Afgdfguw, Eetgreg, Uga, Boo, which would you choose?)

If problems occur then, anyway, regular users are not those who would try and
would fix them.

For an advanced user, sure, use language you want. And if you choose your
native language and if you can't find a solution to your trouble, try
different keywords. Or reinstall nVidia driver in english version.

English speakers will have a hard time to understand this.

------
peter_severin
I use Ubuntu in French and I find the translations to be in a pretty good
shape. When I get an error message then I just use the command line to launch
the same program in English: LC_ALL=en_US program. Works pretty well.

Recently I switched my parents to a Romanian version of Ubuntu and I was
pretty disappointed with the state of translations. Bad wording, inconsistent
translations, partial translations etc. But English is not an option for my
parents. For now I try to identify translation problems and contribute patches
to fix them.

------
neonscribe
Another small example of the network effect increasing the dominance of the
already-dominant language.

~~~
eru
Yes, but the dominant languages can change over time.

~~~
cema
And they do, However, in different contexts. Latin has been the language of
(European) science long after it stopped being dominant in other respects.
English can turn out to remain dominant in technological fields, specifically
software, for a long time, even as other languages may overtake it otherwise.

~~~
eru
Yes. German was also very important in science at the end of the 19-th
century.

~~~
neonscribe
And French was the language of diplomacy from the 17th century until WWII.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca>

~~~
eru
I guess Chinese should have been quite important in east Asia (and getting
important again right now)? Any experts on that around here?

~~~
stan_rogers
"Chinese" is a special case, in that there are actually a large number of
spoken languages (of which Cantonese and Mandarin are merely the best-known
outside of the region) that share a common system of writing that is largely
independent of the sounds of spoken language(1). Imagine, if you will, that a
person could write something in French and someone else could read it as if it
were Italian, Spanish or Romanian without a hiccup. I18n would be a much
easier task if European languages were so encoded, no doubt, but literacy
itself would become a much more remarkable accomplishment.

(1)A large number of Chinese characters are composed of a syllable radical
which originally acted as a guide to pronunciation (say, "ma") along with a
context indicator which would tell the reader which of the various "ma"
syllables was being used. In the original written language, it probably made
perfect sense, but language drift over time have left the system essentially
arbitrary in most modern Chinese languages.

[EDIT -- tried to use an asterisk there, forgetting that paired asterisks
result in italics.]

~~~
eru
What happened to grammar --- like word order? Did it not drift?

~~~
stan_rogers
Good question -- and the answer is that systematic writing combined with
widespread literacy tends to fossilize language, at least on the page. There
is, for instance, a world of difference between written and spoken English,
the written version being not too very different from what one might have
expected to read in an eighteenth-century document. The vocabulary has changed
somewhat, the modifiers less (ahem) magnificent, but the grammar (and the flow
and phrasing) is essentially the same. In fact, it is really only semantic
drift that prevents us from reading Shakespeare as easily as, say, Tom Wolfe.
Even the spelling in today's written English reflects the pronunciation
prevalent in the London area in the fifteenth century. None of us, though (or
at least none of us who regularly interact with other English-speaking humans)
would speak spontaneously in any way like the way we write. The situation is
similar in other languages; in spoken French, for instance, one only hears the
_ne verb pas_ negation in the context of strong emphasis, the grammaticized
_pas_ having completely replaced the original negator _ne_ in day-to-day
speech. Only tweets, text messages and smilies will prevent English from being
as static as written "Chinese".

------
riobard
Seems the author never try any software/website originally written in
languages other than English. Then, the English version is usually awful to
use or get help ...

And the issue is primarily due to the large online population and knowledge
base of English-speaking people. You can find enough info about any topic if
such population exists, i.e. I found a lot info about linux in German
language, probably due to popularity of the OS in Germany.

------
xtho
Google does some automatic translation of common terms and provides an option
to search for pages in different languages. If this feature improves, this
advice could soon become obsolete.

Anyway, one reason for using English versions is that localizations are often
rather strange and that GUIs or less well tested. It can easily happen that a
text doesn't really fit into the space that was left for the English message.

------
Loic
Interesting that for debugging purpose only, the author considers that one
should use the software stack in English only. I am sorry, but the wonder of
humanity is coming from our differences. I speak French, German, English and
Danish, each language allows me to think/reflect on different themes
differently. I can express some concepts in German with one word for example
"Schadenfreude" which would require a complete sentence in French.

Now imagine, you are deep into doing some work in German and you need to
switch all the time between your "German" work and your "English" tools
because your computer may crash and you may need to copy/paste an error
message in a search engine. This is a usability disaster. I am really
surprised that lot of HN readers are supporting such idea when at the same
time the majority of people here have high praise for good design and
usability.

------
fohlin
You should use software in the language of its authors, given that you speak
it, of course. This language just happens be English most of the time.
Localization is, in my experience, almost always poorly done.

------
davidw
Summary: human languages have network effects too, and using one of the more
popular ones may have benefits.

------
dazzawazza
I'd go as far as to say everyone should just move to English for everything,
not just Operating Systems.

~~~
Slashed
I speak two languages: English and Russian. Though it drives me crazy when I
have to use software and especially cellphones in Russian - I can't understand
anything there.

I'd say, everyone needs to know English, but I wouldn't like if majority
switched to English as their only language. In my opinion, other languages
help us to learn history of their countries.

~~~
algorias
Agreed. English is _the_ second (or third, in my case) language to know, but
it would make me very sad if everyone started using English in contexts that
don't require it.

~~~
rdtsc
> ...using English in contexts that don't require it.

Yes. But I would think in the information technology domain, most of the
entities don't translate very well. For example words like 'daemon', 'driver',
'segmentation fault' etc. these acquire a certain meaning that just cannot be
translated easily to other languages. So you end up with half-half type mix,
half of the words in English half in the native language. It ends up sounding
silly.

------
mootothemax
Heh, I moved to Poland three months ago from my native England, and the one
thing that's really helping me with the language is setting my Windows
installation to be in Polish.

Note: I guess this step isn't necessary if, unlike me, you don't suck at
learning languages ;)

~~~
yardie
You are braver than I. I originally had a french PC. I gave it a solid go but
having to translate errors to english, then try to translate it the specific
english, then trying to translate it back to french just slowed me down
immensely. It was faster to install Windows [English] and keep the french copy
in a container.

------
zyb09
This is very true. I actually try to reverse translate lots of error messages
back to English when googling for help. It's not always easy to get the
correct wording however.

------
c00p3r
What is really better - is to set up google search preferences to search in
English language, instead of auto-detected by GEO-location or your browser's
language settings.

You will be surprised by the huge difference in search results when you forces
google to search only in English.

Also try to read English language news instead of your native. You will
discover, that world is much bigger than those biased and poorly translated
articles you can found on a popular localized sites.

------
adrinavarro
So I got a Mac.

Now seriously: that's not a real reason to use the whole system in English. I
do that (except for the keyboard layout, I love the Spanish one <3), but I
don't think I anyone should ever do it if they don't really like/feel
comfortable to. Translations are very good, so that wouldn't be a reason...
and IMHO what the post describes is an acceptable risk (hey, you probably will
get sorted of this, but will have to Google more than a few minutes).

~~~
adrinavarro
Any other opinions?

