Re: Support

["Bryan Haskins" <kingofallhearts999@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have to agree with you, all the support claims slipping through that I've seen people have explicitly said that they were from country x and spoke language y,  or were obviously formed of broken English attributed to language y. Because of this we definitely need to make things a bit more "language neutral" I'm also not saying translate everything for everyone. But make it easier for people using English as a second language. This should require almost no effort. And it just a matter of literal speaking. Most people who learn English as a foreign language still think in the mindset of their native language, therefore, to accommodate that we have to be literal and blunt.

On Jan 5, 2008 8:24 PM, Mackenzie Morgan <macoafi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jan 4, 2008 6:56 AM, Pedro Alejandro Lopez-Valencia <palopezv@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 15:41 +1100, Sarah Hobbs wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Bruce Cowan wrote:
> > There appears to have been a lot of support requests to this list, does
> > anyone know why there has been a sudden increase?
>
> I would assume it's the same reason that people request cds to be sent
> to them - they don't read, even what's blatantly in front of them.

There is also the language and though-process barriers. As far as I've
noticed, all requests for this kind of help have come from native
Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. My experience trying to learn Mandarin
and Japanese is that as a native speaker of any romanic/germanic/slavic
european language, you have to rewire your brain to be able to think in
any sino-altaic language and from the comments from friends who are
native speakers of CJKV llanguages, it holds true the other way around.
Accordingly, perception of reality is very different. Human languages
can be as mind altering as schroom salad. :-)

Hmm.... I bet they are hitting the list after reading the help pop-up at
launchpad.net. It is not clear enough! What about changing:

"""
You can also find help on the Launchpad users mailing list or online via
IRC, on Freenode, channel #launchpad.
"""

to something explicit:

"""
You can also find help on using Launchpad atthe Launchpad users mailing
list or online via IRC, on Freenode, channel #launchpad. For help with
Ubuntu please visit https://lists.ubuntu.com.
"""

Or similar.

Hey here's something else to consider:  are the messages shown only in English?  Perhaps it'd be good if at least error messages (the whole site would be insane) were shown in multiple languages.  I know GMail looks at the user agent string and sets the language of the GMail login screen to whatever language your computer's locale is set for.  Could something similar be done to show the error and help messages in the visitor's native language?

--
Mackenzie Morgan
Linux User #432169
ACM Member #3445683
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com <-my blog of Ubuntu stuff
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Cheers,
Bryan