On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 08:01:26AM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 12:20:06PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > > I don't know where the English l10n team got the idea from that there > > is something wrong with a computer speaking to the user in the first > > person. But in my opinion this criticism is entirely misplaced. > > I believe this stems from a feeling that having the computer speak in > first-person form implies some form of (artificial?) sentience on the > part of the computer. A computer is an inanimate object that just > happens to have the capability to make calculations and interact with > humans. Would you refer to a table as a person?
I would say it's not so much the lack of actual sentience but the lack of a person, be it real or fictional. It's fine for "I" to appear in the speech bubble of an animated paperclip, because it's the cutesy paperclip speaking. It's just a cartoony character and we can accept that. Inside a debconf question it is just weird. The problem is the sudden disembodied voice out of nowhere. I think it's bad style to use "I" without establishing the speaker first and it *grates*. For that reason it also appears to be written by a non-native speaker of English who literally translated some idiom of their native language without recognizing that it looks off in English (cf. referring to a computer or program as "he"). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120212183449.ga9...@amos.fritz.box
