Re: Rethinking "Supported language"

[Duarte Loreto <happyguy_pt hotmail com>]

Hello

I'm not very verbose on the list but I believe I should step in this talk.

> Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:57:45 +0100
> From: "Kenneth Nielsen" 
> Subject: Re: Rethinking "Supported language"
> To: gnome-i18n gnome org
> Message-ID:
> 	
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
>> Frankly, I hadn't been convinced by any of the proposals until now. The
>> 80%/50% rules are not perfect, but unless we have some serious method to
>> be more accurate, like Danilo proposed in his D-L HACKING file, I don't
>> see any reason to change it now.
> 
>  +1
 
+1 for me. And I'll reason it in three different ways:
1st - The "Typical users don't use localized Dev Tools" argument
2nd - Size of teams and 80% difficulty
3rd - GNOME Global Team motivation and perceived product quality

Disclaimer: Portuguese is at 100%

* The "Typical users don't use localized Dev Tools" argument
This may be true in some north european countries that have language roots similar to those of the english language. But it is not true for south european languages, like Portuguese, that are latin based, for instance. Nor for other parts of the globe where Linux is having great adoption.

Even if in the begining of IT developers would only have english tools, with the i18n and L10n evolution, current university students are becoming more and more used to have books and tools on their native language. Then some expressions are adapted to native words, some rare expressions are kept as the original. But the tools are native.

One last point is concerned with what is the main target for GNOME and Linux on the desktop on each country. Using Portugal as an example, until recently Linux on the desktop was used mainly by young people (
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