openstack team mailing list archive

[Joshua Harlow <harlowja@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sure but to contribute they have to understand python which itself is english based??
I can understand for sys-ops people that can't understand english this might be useful, but then they are running in unix which is also english based.

For FE (front-end facing) sites I completely agree that, those must be made i8ln accessible. But at a code/logging level? I thought english won at that level (since if not all programming languages that I know of are english based - minus brainfuck, haha). But maybe this is just my bias, from working at a company that does this (code in english, comments in english....).

Do other open source projects attempt to do this? I've never seen apache log messages in different languages, or hadoop logging in different languages, but maybe that's just my lack of experience/not using that feature.

-Josh

On 2/13/12 1:09 PM, "Ronald Bradford" <ronald.bradford@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Josh,

I cannot speak about the i18n specifics in OpenStack, but let me give you an answer to the general question.
I added a slide to a presentation last week that uses the graph at http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm  I recommend you check it out.

The title of the slide is "English is not the only language", infact for the majoring of Internet users, English is not the first language. Yes, the tech savvy people probably do understand English, but they do not use it by default.  As a speaker in many different countries, I always see people use native search engines (e.g. German, Espanol etc), it is because that is what they know.  Many web sites (my own ronaldbradford.com <http://ronaldbradford.com> ) for example does not rate well in foreign languages.

The same thought applies to the actual software that runs site and products and is supported by those that do not use English as a first language.  Why should a message be in English and not Spanish?

The ability for foreign language error messages enables more developers from those countries to actively contribute without a requirement of a language.

Regards

Ronald


On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Joshua Harlow <harlowja@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all,

I was just wondering if I could get clarification on something I never understood related to i8ln.

In nova HACKING.rst there is a line that mentions how log messages should be using gettext for i8ln.

Is it common in other companies to attempt to internationalize log messages?

I've seen this throughout the different openstack code and never quite understood why.

I can understand horizon being internationalized, but debugging/error/warning (logging) messages? Isn't that meant to be read by a developer, who will most likely understand english (to some degree).

??

-Josh



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