en-US language presumption (was...)

[Paul Sladen]

On Fri, 28 Aug 2009, Matthew East wrote:
> We use American English consistently throughout applications

If this presumption is being made, then it is a bug.  People should be free
to code their human-readable appliation output in whatever (human) language
that group of developers feel most collectively comfortable with.

I personally write my error messages in UTF-8 formatted en-GB---it would be
an unfair bunden to expect me to be familiar with en-US (or en-CA, en-AU,
en-*)---and I would be more likely to make mistakes in attempting to do so.

...This is the reason that translation teams exist;  they are competant
to take the $untranslated input and translate it to en-US, just as much as
the other locale teams do for de-AT, zh-HK, pt-BR.

Those strings in your mobile phone (cell phone) ... there's a reasonable
chance they are/were in Finnish and the English-* is a mere translation.

* * *

Whilst a large percentage of free software communication does take place in
a form of mutually intelligible Engrish, I'm reminded (particularly so in
Germany) that this is not, and should not be, a defacto expectation---among
users, nor proponents, nor developers.

	-Paul
-- 
Why do one side of a triangle when you can do all three.  Somewhere, GB.