[TYPO3-UG US] ... from New York

[Kasper Skårhøj]

Hi John,

I was adviced to take a look at this thread.

I generally agree with your points but can't feel obliged personally to do
anything about them. Surely it has outgrown my management capabilities. I'm
relying on someone else to fix it for me.

>   - US English? I can't begin to touch upon the poor US English I've
> been exposed to during my course with Typo3.  i.e. "Splitted"? Perhaps
> it's a word, but I (we?) never use/hear it; instead I(we?) use "split".
>   "I split the log for firewood" not "I splitted the log..."  but hey,
> it's O/S so it's OK right?  wrong... I can not tell a US company to not
> worry about the poor English... or teach them to use the Euro date input
> format 

It's actually kind of nice for once to have developed something with a
distinct european touch that US citizens now have to deal with. Then you
know how it feels when technology and standards are imposed on you from
abroad :-)

Anyway, I understand your frustration. I guess it is little like when I talk
in Danish with immigrants in my own country and they swap the words in the
sentence and generally are pretty hard to understand. Unfortunately, their
limited capabilities to speak my language has a tendency of making me think
less of their intelligence although it is completely disconnected. I always
guessed TYPO3 would suffer from this effect in US/UK. Maybe that is why it
is most popular in Europe where no one speaks english natively and
therefore have the same forgiving attitude to the grammar mistakes.

Actually, I like most speaking english to non-natives. The reason is that we
are in the same boat. Nobody feel inferior which I typically do when
speaking with native speakers. You should actually be happy that I decided
and insisted very early on write all code comments and publish all
documentation in the best english I could. It wasn't easy! It's much easier
for me to write in native danish and put the exact words on things I want
to describe. Yet I didn't. Just imagine how much worse it would be if I was
german! There are 100 million german native speakers and with that audience
I wouldn't have to worry about an english translation for years!

... and btw, native english speakers are a minority anyway; in the world
there are more people capable of speaking and writing english who has
another mother tongue. Better get used to it.

Well, I could go on for a while, but the point is this: "To succeed in life,
all you need is ignorance and confidence". I like to be ignorant about my
shortcomings in writing proper english (and much else) and instead just do
it with confidence! If I were asked to pay attention to grammar, spelling
etc. that would completely paralyze every initiative. Yet I acknowledge
every imperfection in the documentation you can point out, but it is not my
job to fix it.


Suggestion: Concern yourself with mistakes in the most static and popular
material about TYPO3. That could be the .com websites, the Getting Started
document, the backend translation and context sensitive help etc. Having a
proof-reader workflow in action is quite expensive in terms of time and
efforts and it doesn't make sense to apply it on every published bit of
english.
To the degree you can define such areas of focus for proof-reading I would
be in favor of letting you fix stuff.

> Epilogue: Typo3 is, by far, the best O/S CMS I've come across.

Thank you!

-- 
Kasper Skårhøj