On Wed, 1 May 2002, John Summerfield wrote:
> > On Tue, 30 Apr 2002, John Summerfield wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > salimma1@yahoo.co.uk said:
> > > > There's no excuse about translating the manual as here in UK the
> > > > manuals are all in English !
> > >
> > > English? Or American?
> > >
> > What do you expect, Red Hat manuals on scouse or geordie dialect?
> >
> > I doubt they have nor the ozzie dialect more than they have
> > for the jocks or paddies either ;)
>
>
> Standard English is indistinguishable from what you might term Standard
> Australian. Even my spoken English is often taken (by the English) as English
> with an English accent, and I've never been outside Australia.
>
Right, this is all OT.
IMHO bad english is the most common spoken language around the world :)
I was two years contracted in Riyadh (KSA) to Lucent. Arabic is
spoken there by the arabic region natives, africans, muslims etc. but
english in some form is most common languages westerners use. Just some
figures there are abound 20M Saudi residents, wich of around 5M lives in
Riyadh. (BTW birth rate there is about 1 child per one minute, that's
some crowt of population about 52500 childs per year to start with).
Most of the ~5M expats in Kingdom are from neibourgh countries and
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines etc. Many locals
don't speak anything else but arabic but with english you can manage
there most of the situations.
There is quite large native english speaking western expat community
which majority are around 30000 brits, scotties and irish, thousands of
ozzies, kiwis, 12000 U.S citizens and thousands of canadians too many
places to count, hundreds of south africans. Hundred thousands of eastern
immigrants from countries where english is either official language or
spoken commonly otherwise. In addition to english there is smaller
communities of people from mainland europe speaking each spanish, dutch,
german and french.
Thus Saudi and especially Riyadh is not just real babel of different
languages but different english dialects too. The good money and no taxes
(yet though 2.5% is planned) has some meaning to many.
>From many of the western community members there some who had been ten
or more years some freshmen only 6 months I heard more english dialects
in one place I could ever imagine :)
And by the time my spoken english also became better, propaly because
I was surrounded all the time and used english for weeks withouth saying
a word of my native language and started to also think directly in
english instead translating.
After a while I started learning how to pick quite many differencies how
english is spoken around the world and even small nuances in smaller
geographical areas from mainland UK.
The language issue there is more interesting, constant issue of
play and joy can be found teasing each other. It's more popular
than speaking about weather down there which is sunny and hot almost
all the time... wasn't too much to discuss.
Later I found that even though there were those that had been longer
periods and they've been exposed to this babel the pronunciation had
changed from many but some expressions still revealed where the speaker
was originated.
Therefore it's not what you just sound, but it's also what and how you
say that expose your origin.
And many native english speaker have said to me that it has been very
healty experience for them to have such a diverse community where to
practise your ear to distingquish differencies. The language for anybody
moving to a place like that will cause a cultural shock of some kind.
> The Language isn't so much a problem, but I do get fed up telling my computer we
> use A4 paper. Once I tell it I live in Perth, WA then it should KNOW I use A4
> paper, measure lengths in metres, write dates dd/mm/yy and so on.
>
But, aren't you oversimplifying the matter a bit?
First, many countries there are different languages spoken, they
have different keyboard layouts, the office standards like paper
form size is usually the same, but then again there are people
that with good reason don't like to turn for example the user
interface to their native language even if it was possible.
I have C locale, with ISO-8859-1 (or propably should have 8859-15)
character set, english is my preferred user interface as I have used
these darn computers more than 15 years and i don't want to be
forced relearn many things in finnish just because it's now there.
I shouldn't have any problems, and I don't, having (US or UK english)
environment in finland, having finnish/swedish keyboard (as nothing
else is available here) with european standard office forms etc.
I agree that you propably should have some kind of simple
setup for those who like to have some standard environment at
that location of the world, but definitely preserving options
to change easily. Or do you think that just that you took a
position from Malaga Spain you either have to use spanish
settings or pretend to be yet at Perth?
I don't think it would be very useful, remember that a lot of
people are expats or for other reason don't wan't the local
setup for that region.
> And that my first choice of dictionary is Australian English and if
> that's not available then UK English is fine.
>
How many of the more than 50 spoken major english dialects you
think would be worth localization? All or just few?
There is not really one UK English. You should once visit UK
to find this out and be amazed how hard it's first to understand
people from such a small geographical area. Picking up the ozzie
or other dialects from noth america are lot easier than understanding
geordie or jock grunting english. The english language differs a lot
both sides and up and down the west coast too.
And once you travel and end up in pub, meet a scotchmen who will
propably tell you that the only good thing that comes out of
England is the road to Scotland :)
Local people do understand each other dialects there but they dislike
some more than you propaly dislike US English, they would like to
have localization for their living area too. Or don't they?
:-) riku
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