> Actually, even with the foreign sites, I believe that most of them elect to > not run the translated messages options. I don't normally > go to the sites (actually I never go there), but it seems to me in the > meetings that (at least the people I deal with) seem to speak > English as well (or better) than I do. In fact, they seem to take it as high > praise if I should mention it. The few discussions I have > had about the subject are that it's no harder to learn English for manual > reading than any other language. [...snip…] > The decline in alternate language options though (at least for messages) > seems to be more because of lack of desire on > the part of the sites rather than the vendors not creating the option(s).
It has a lot to do with the history of the people involved – the people most sensitive to this issue tend to have long histories of not being permitted to use their indigenous languages, and quietly resent being told that the fiat language is the only one that matters even if they are perfectly capable of doing their jobs in the fiat language. It’s a matter of pride – it doesn’t have a rational basis, but bien, tu l'as maintenant. :) I dealt with a customer that was maintaining a Aranese (a dialect used in Catalonia) copy of the IBM message repository for just this reason, and there are still lots of sites in France and Quebec that insist on messages and docs in French. It also has a lot to do with the cost of translating the messages – nobody wants to pay extra for it. I find it interesting that (at least for VM) the last non-English options offered were German, Japanese and uppercase English (commonly used to deal with Hebrew and Russian conventions for text mapping and display) which map to the largest concentrations of non-US mainframe users. IBM and DEC (and to some extent, HP by way of inheriting the DEC user base as well as their own user base) did a better than average job here, but it still needs work. (If you want to find out how much impact this can be, enable Mandarin support in your copy of Windows and watch the bloat -- oink). I think there’s also a question of having predictable patterns for automation packages – many explicitly set AMENG as the language so you don’t have to replicate a bunch of code for matching patterns. It’s probably less relevant now than it was when there were lots of interactive users, but I have heard non-US users comment on it as a barrier that needed to be overcome. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
