On Tue, 8 May 2001, Shawn McMahon wrote:
If we are going to be politically correct and insist that every NOC in the world be capable of communicating in all of the major languages of the world, the Internet will grind to a halt.
And if we are going to insist that they all speak English, we are going to be insisting to deaf ears; case in point, all the complaints here about abuse complaints being blackholed.
The very practical hard reality is that those running the Internet communicate in English. The reason for this is very simple: cost. In Europe, adding simultaneous translation into the major EU languages can easily double the cost of holding a conference. This sort of compromise is universal. There are many languages within China, for example, but people compromise by using one of them for universal communications, the language commonly called Mandarin. Nobody is insisting that the world's NOCs communicate in English. They just do, because it's practical. In most countries, there is a very high probability that anyone with a technical education has had several years of English in school. This is certainly the case in Japan, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, most of Southeast Asia, and the countries of northern Europe. It may be that in ten years or so machine translation will be accurate enough and cheap enough to allow the sort of thing that you propose. However, I suspect that most people will use this high quality machine translation to improve the quality of their translations to and from English. Once again, it's simple economics: if there are N languages, the cost of writing translators to and from English is going to be proportional to N, but the cost of writing a full set of translators between all N languages is going to be proportional to N squared, a huge number. Attempting to build a universal tool for translating problem reports into all the languages of the world is a utopian project that is not going to succeed. A more realistic goal would be trying to get English-speaking engineers to write problem reports in good, clear English. I don't think that that is going to happen, and it's far easier to achieve than what you are proposing. -- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015