IMO, we should not be trying to decide between US and Int’l English. If any of our documentation is unclear or confusing, even if entirely written in US English, we should make an attempt to improve it, and try to be aware of possible confusion not only between US and Int’l English, but, as Mark pointed out, dialects as well.
For example, I don’t know if our documentation actually contains the phrase “your email address is missing a period”, but if it does, the answer is not to replace it with “your email address is missing a full stop”, but rather, “your email address is missing a ‘.’”. Before we go off spending energy rewriting the doc, I would like to see evidence that folks are finding it confusing and that some change is going to make a difference. I don’t recall very many JIRA issues about confusing documentation or threads on the mailing list. There is a cost to these tweaks: the commit email gets seen and reviewed by several people (in theory). I also don’t think we could ever fully transition to Int’l English. IMO, Adobe put a stake in the ground by creating classes like ColorPicker and SolidColor that goes in the “color” property. I would be against renaming these classes. Further, the W3C put a stake in the ground by standardizing on the CSS properties “color” and “backgroundColor”. I would be against creating non-standard color properties. And thus, I would not be in favor of our default documentation saying things like “Use the ColorPicker to select a colour”. That said, I’d be open to spending more time discussing how to localize all of our content, not just to Int’l English, but to any language. We’ve localized the Installer so there isn’t an either/or discussion for its content. Folks like Justin can maintain the en_AU and other non-en_US resources. Should we localize TDF? Could we localize the website? One worry about localizing everything is the energy required to keep the locales in sync, and the amount of commit traffic resulting in that maintenance. But if others are willing, I’d go along. Do we know if any other Apache projects localize all of their content? I also thought of a variant: would there be an issue if individual committers built out their own website (hosted on their own domain) that had a translated copy of flex.a.o and we offered links to it on the home page? We’d probably add disclaimers about non-promotion and possibly being out-of-date. Anything totally out of date would get its link removed from our site. I don’t know how hard it would be to do, but visitors from other locales would be offered maybe a popup that says something like “An Australian English version of this website is available at flex.justinmclean.com. Apache Flex makes no warranties as to the correctness of the content there. Apache does not endorse or promote justinmclean.com”. This would give us an idea of the click-through so we could see how beneficial localized web content would be and whether we want to take that on as a community. Thoughts? -Alex On 11/18/14, 9:46 AM, "Kessler CTR Mark J" <mark.kessler....@usmc.mil> wrote: > Well it's definitely different if US English is your only English >exposure really. I mean no one here is having conversations stating full >stop at the end of a declarative sentence. In the US you would just >call it a period (your cycles comment lol). So yes you would have to >correct me all the time if we went to international English for lots of >simple things. > >Glad we ruled out slang too, because some places here we call exclamation >marks "bang" signs. > > >-Mark > >-----Original Message----- >From: Harbs [mailto:harbs.li...@gmail.com] >Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2014 12:14 PM >To: dev@flex.apache.org >Subject: Re: International English > >I live in Israel and have plenty of friends from the UK and Europe. I >have plenty of exposure to International English and I’m aware of the >differences. Yes. There are some differences in expressions, but I still >think there’s no one who would think email has menstrual cycles… ;-) > >On Nov 18, 2014, at 2:58 PM, Justin Mclean <jus...@classsoftware.com> >wrote: > >>> I don’t believe anyone has trouble “translating” between US and >>>International English >> >> You'll be surprised, a lot of US expressions and words are virtually >>unknown outside of the US and can be confusing eg "You email address is >>missing a period" has a totally different meaning outside the US. >
