Re: [Ltru] What people want (Was: my technical position on extlang

Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic dot fr> wrote:

> Most people, in practice, say neither #1 nor #2. They say "get the 
> languages I understand and like". It is not restricted to languages 
> that are mutually intelligible, users expect the software to know 
> everything *they* know (for instance that most literate people in 
> Tunisia can read French, even if this language has no official status 
> in Tunisia).

Internet Explorer 7 says, in "Language Preferences":

"Add the languages you use to read websites, listing in order of 
preference.  Only add the ones you need, as some characters can be used 
to impersonate websites in other languages."

It then asks me to choose between 13 different regional flavors of 
English, even though I can hardly imagine a literate Web surfer who can 
read one or more of these regional flavors but not all of them.  The 
last thing I would want to do would be to exclude Canadian English on 
the basis that it is somehow fundamentally different from United States 
English.  I've set my preferred languages in IE7 to en-US, en-CA, en-GB, 
and es-MX, but in doing so I've already locked out the other 10 
Englishes and 19 Spanishes, all of which would be equally acceptable.

I think this nicely exemplifies, if not proves, Stéphane's point:

> Since nobody considers adding this complicated and often-changing 
> information to the LSR, we must accept that we will not be able to 
> deliver to the end-users what they really want.
>
> Therefore, we should stay focused on delivering something which may 
> not be the perfect solution to every language problem, but which is at 
> least useful and consistent.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Arvada, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ

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