What language to use

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/12/01 10:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/12/01/498866.aspx

On Language Log, Bill Poser posted about how Icelandic Studies are Shifting to English, quoted in part here:

This isn't an entirely unfamiliar development: there are other fields in which foreigners play a major, if not the major, role. Indeed, it is really what we should expect. So long as a field attracts the interest of outsiders, given that the number of outsiders is larger, often much larger, than the number of natives, statistically speaking we should expect to see foreigners play the larger role. Of course, disparities in access to education and interest in scholarship will affect the relative prominence of different countries, as will differences in access to important resources and motivation. No one should be surprised that Arabs are not prominent in glaciology or that few experts on camels are Scandinavian.

His post made me think of the role that language plays in locales, for some reason.

Every locale has things such as the language name and the country name in three different languages for a given install:

• The name in the native language of the locale
• The name in English
• The name in the language of the particular localized installation of Windows

I guess that means that we have English as some kind of ultimate fallback, the localized language as the preferred one to show, and the native language as the one that not every person will know for every single locale (imagine if using Windows required you to know 100 languages!).

When you add the Language Interface Pack (LIP) concept to the mix, something interesting happens. Because this is a partial localization based on what people would most frequently see and expect to see in their native language, the decision of whether to translate those lists of languages and countries and such is an individual one made by the localizer. Which brings me inevitably back to Bill's post and why it got me thinking about this whole issue:

What is interesting here is that the subject in question is the sort that is often taken to be at the heart of the national character, one that only a native can fully appreciate. One hesitates to imagine the reaction to a proposal that French university courses on mediaeval French language, literature, and history should be conducted in English on the grounds that foreign scholars now dominate the field.

Since the localizer's job here is in many ways an advocate for the target language to which they are working to appropriately translate, similar decisions have to be made for every string, especially when it is a string that is easy to see in a user interface that is not commonly launched (Regional and Language Options, in this case).

I would hesitate to imagine the reaction if the French localization of Windows did not translate this list (luckily French is not a partial localization so we do not have to find out!).

But it is fascinating to contemplate this particular aspect of the localizer's job in the LIP scenario, which almost becomes an extended version of the "Lifeboat" scenario as what to take on the boat and what to leave is decided. Especially when (inevitably) non-native testers of the LIP will file bug reports about strings that are not translated, since there is no way for them to know if a string not translated was missed by oversight or by a decision that lies at the heart of the national character....

Thanks for the inspiration, Bill. :-)

This post brought to you by "Đ" (U+0110, a.k.a. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH STROKE)

# orcmid on 1 Dec 2005 10:32 AM:

# Maurits [MSFT] on 1 Dec 2005 3:21 PM:

# Michael S. Kaplan on 1 Dec 2005 4:20 PM:

# Maurits [MSFT] on 1 Dec 2005 4:49 PM:

# Maurits [MSFT] on 1 Dec 2005 5:20 PM:

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