Well sorry again Dave, but you are still mistaken. Most of the UN General Assembly delegates are english speakers and all while in the general assembly meetings have real time translation capability both ways...
That was part of my point. To recap, it is basically threefold, and I think we're almost fully in agreement:
1) Unlike the UN delegates, we (IETF, ICANN, etc.) aren't in a profession where one could reasonably expect us to generally be so proficient in so many foreign languages, that we could be expected to read a given language, even a fairly widespread one like Spanish.
Actually you are in fact describing the current situation, except that there is only one language we are all expected to be proficient in: English.
2) The exception to #1 is a very basic proficiency in English (even if with a heavy accent, limited vocabulary, and bad grammar and spelling), since it is the lingua franca of today's world, especially in computers and business.
I don't think it makes sense to start defending English as a choice. Yes, many people speak it, but even more don't. English has particularly hard pronunciation, spelling and vocabulary. If this were a matter of choice, it would make all kinds of sense to choose something other than English. But the fact of the matter is that all IETF and nearly all related I* business has been conducted in English since inception, and changing languages now is infeasible.
3) We don't have anywhere near the money to do all the translating the UN does, let alone distributed in real-time like they do.
This is certainly true for the IETF, but not necessarily for the ICANN or the RIRs. Also, the situation for all of these is different. I strongly believe even assuming limitless budgets, the IETF should use just one language. We have trouble enough making clear standards documents in a single language that all IETF participants understand. Consider the situation where I write a draft in Dutch, it is translated into English and then the English version into Japanese, which is then implemented. Learning English all around is much more effective.
However, the RIRs and ICANN deal with the public at large to some degree, and in many parts of the world it can't be assumed that said public universally speaks English. This is especially true in areas where there is another "big" language such as in Latin America (Spanish) and Asia (Chinese). (Although I believe China has as many ISPs and domain name holders as, say, Luxemburg, so using Chinese would probably not make much sense.) So if LACNIC accepts IP address requests in Portuguese and Spanish, and I can deal with the new ICANN office in Brussels in Dutch, that would be just fine. On the other hand, there are way too many languages in the world to be able to deal with every interested individual in their own language.
But policy matters that go beyond an office or RIR region should be in English to avoid problems. Note that address policies by definition have global impact, as all those prefixes must be stored in routers worldwide, which is something the RIRs don't seem to realize when once again decreasing minimum allocation sizes.
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