[Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
EMC2 is a company who sells storage solutions to big companies. I was at a
presentation of their documentation manager. He informed his audience that
the people who buy their products invariably state that they prefer the
English documentation. They always get the translations as well. The benefit
to EMC2 is that they sell more products. The translation of their
documentation adds pennies to the pound in costs, costs that are easily
offset by the increased sales.

The point is that people understand things better when they are addressed in
their own language EVEN when they can read the language that is foreign to
them.
Thanks,
        GerardM

2008/11/30 geni <geniice at gmail.com>

> 2008/11/30 effe iets anders <effeietsanders at gmail.com>:
> > Because bear in mind, especially in those languages, a complemented work
> of
> > human knowledge really adds something. In the large languages, we already
> > had encyclopediae and dictionaries of good quality. Wikipedia is better
> > sure, and has improved our lives. But now just imagine that you are
> living
> > in Botswana, and on school (if you're lucky) there is very little
> material
> > available... and now there is an encyclopedia... In YOUR language!
>
> English is an official language of Botswana. Quite a lot of African
> countries move to English or French for education above a certain
> level.
>
> >Even if
> > it only contains 1000 articles,
>
> ~102 articles currently.
>
> > you can already learn a lot from it. You can
> > improve your knowledge, and increase the odds in competition with the
> > western world.
>
> What is Tswana for mass spectrometry (looking at the translations for
> that term across European languages is mildly amusing) ? There are
> large areas where if you don't speak english you can't operate in that
> area. There is nothing wikimedia can do about this. Highly
> questionable if we would even want to.
>
> This doesn't mean we should give up on many languages but it does mean
> that we have to accept that the educated people from those countries
> may not want to use them and there is a significant risk of them
> becoming POV forks.
>
>
>
> --
> geni
>
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