Discussing internationalization (#i18n) issues at work.
A coworker noted that only one customer has asked about it. We have theaters across England and Ireland. As of 2021 there were 880,000 people in England and Wales that don't speak English well, and 160,000 that don't speak it at all. + plenty more in Ireland.
Don't confuse a lack of request for internationalization with a lack of need for internationalization.
Language is a lot like disability. "average" people don't think about it. They assume their language is fine, because it works fine for them and is the default where they live, so they don't think about folks who aren't native in it.
Similarly, able bodied people don't think about how hard it is to get a wheelchair into places, or what it'd take to get a sign language interpreter to help deaf people understand a performance they put on. Or, whatever.
In the US essentially ALL developers write their apps in english only despite the fact that over 50% of US households speak it at home. There were over 37 MILLION Spanish speakers in the US (as of 2015 census) + another 10m "other indo-european languages"
again, lack of request doesn't mean lack of need.
Don't assume that your state of being is the same as everyone else's, or that other people don't need mental, linguistic, or physical help to use your stuff.
@masukomi@alcinnz
It's the old problem that no non-English (or non-German in my case) visitors are noted, mainly because the site never bothered with i18n. And because the i18n isn't budgeted, no one bothers.
@masukomi@jalcine My first role was doing design work at a translation company. We did TfL stuff at the time, one of the stakeholders told me they had minimal requests for the languages they added (we started off with ~10 but quickly moved to ~25) but they consistently needed emergency extra print runs once they were released…
if someone NEEDS language X but all the stuff is in language Y, how exactly does anyone expect them to request X ? It's a chicken and egg problem unless they happen to be semi-fluent in Y in which case they don't need X.
@damngoodtech yes.
at work: it's kinda-sorta-not-really but what we have is based on Ruby on Rails built-in stuff.
personal software:
ruby: RoR built-in. Trying to be good about it.
crystal: was 💩 last time i looked so none & i don't touch crystal anymore.
raku: 🤷♀️ on my todo-list.
chicken scheme: oh gods no. ;)
@damngoodtech that being said, most of my software libraries where language doesn't apply, and the rest is incredibly niche open-source stuff with like 2 users other than me so... 🤷♀️
#DevGood will be 100% translated/translatable before release with EN and EO versions since that's likely to actually be used by a wide swath of folks.
@damngoodtech not really, for a variety of technical reasons. Also those are typically just Google translate quality, which is to say “bad”. It’s good enough to get your meaning across… sometimes, but it doesn’t capture intent or implied meaning, and translating idioms is wicked hard. Also sometimes it’s just wrong.
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