Re: Flaws dans les plans pour dominations du monde

[Aidan Cully <aidan kublai com>]

On Mon, Sep 18, 2000 at 05:27:20AM +0500, Lauris Kaplinski wrote:
> 
> > Yeah, my French sucks.
> > It makes more sense to me to have separate mailing lists for discussions in
> > different languages, than to have multi-lingual posts on this list.  If
> > you're going to post in non-English languages to this list, I'd like to
> > suggest at *least* putting in a language tag that we can filter on...  E.g.,
> > an X-Language: fr header, or prefixing the subject with [FR].
> 
> Well, how many people are there, who know french at least as much, as is
> needed
> to understand e-mails on specific topic. I'll bet that quite many.
> How many of them would subscribe to french-only list - very few.
> So I think, there should be only one list, and let everyone express
> him(her)self
> in the language of choice.

How many people know Japanese, Swedish, Finnish, Russian, &c.?  I bet a
large number of people know at least one of those, but if everyone chose
to communicate using their first languages, maybe you've got 50% messages
in English, 15% French, 15% Spanish, 10% Japanese, &c., &c..  Then you
might get people that *only* speak other languages subscribing to the list,
and it could easily end up being the case that 70% of the messages sent to
a particular subscriber are indecipherable (save via the inaccurate,
inconvenient mechanism of Babelfish) to him.

> > I agree with the need to let people discuss GNOME, and other projects, in
> > their native tongues, but to a lot of us (I'm assuming), the French messages
> > look like noise, and that hurts the signal/noise ratio of the list.
> 
> I am not so sure that postings in french/german/... would hurt much.
> Keeping list english-only does not guarantee you good signal/noise ratio
> -
> and if people write better in their native language, using it can even
> raise the level.

It'll raise the level for people that speak that language.

> > PS: I've got a thought on this involving the mailing list software that I'd
> > be happy to discuss off the list.  It basically involves setting up a bunch
> > of 'gnome-devel-list-<language>' submission addresses, and forwarding them
> > to the gnome-devel-list list server.  The list server would then read a per-
> > user preferences file, which would indicate which languages the user wanted
> > to receive.  Only matching incoming messages would be sent to the user, all
> > seeming to come from gnome-devel-list gnome org, and with a reply-to
> > matching the submission address.
> 
> Hmmm. I have thought about adding translation feature to mailer (OK, to
> be more
> exact, to eveolution, that uses HTML engine for displaying mail anyway).
> So
> if you are really clueless, you can look up, what babelfish (or
> hopefully soon
> some better engine) has to say.
> 
> Btw. if having discussions in some other language serves as good reason
> to took
> out a dictionary and freshen memory, it is only Good Thing.

Taking out a dictionary and freshening memory takes time and effort, which
a) could be better used actually dealing with the content of the message,
and b) makes it less likely that someone will actually spend the time
trying to understand the message.  I realise that this argument could just
as easily be used to say that people that speak English as a second language
are going to have the same trouble dealing with these lists, but, you know,
that's already the case, for a whole lot of free software projects.  I
disagree with solving this problem by introducing a mechanism that prevents
a good chunk of the subscriber base from understanding what's being said.

--aidan