Siduction Forum
Siduction Forum => Free Speech => Topic started by: jaegermeister on 2018/10/06, 00:11:17
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Hello,
after years of roaming since kanotix times through sidux up to siduction, I am on one side completely happy with the distro, but noticing that 80% of the recent topics in the forum goes in German.
While for me this is absolutely not a problem, considering that I speak it, I am wondering if this may keep new users shy away from this awesome distro.
Comments welcome :)
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This has increasingly become a problem for me as a native English speaker with only a short period of German study over 40 years ago. The Upgrade Warnings section states "Please provide both languages" which rarely happens lately.
It's also become worse since the FF extension "GTranslate" which used to work nicely to highlight, right click and translate, has no good replacement since FF 57 dropped the XUL ones. The one I found now often will only translate one sentence at a time.Even opening the page in Google Translate doesn't work reliably any more. I regularly get a message "This page is already in English" even though the posts are in German.
Thanks for bringing this up jaegermeister. siduction is fairly reliable for me so I don't have regular issues having learned how to avoid them over the last 8 years (plus sidux/aptosid time before that) but the forum definitely has become more of a chore to read lately.
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I've been using siduction since its inception, and, I to had to disable GTranslate from Firefox. Even when not in use it was causing a memory leak. Clicking the American flag at the top of the forum thread still gives a decent translation. Well, maybe not the best, but enough to understand what is being written. When I get the "This page is already in English" error occurs, I find a second click on the page with the error usually brings up the translation. I find that if there is something important going on with the Upgrade warnings, someone will also post the warning in English, devil makes sure of that.
I miss the early days of sidux when there many more US people here, but, over the years, things change. Linux has changed, and many of the independent distros like siduction have faded away, or have become more aligned with corporate interests. Luckily, the devs of siduction are still very much engaged in their craft, so, this independent distro lives on. To me, the language difficulty is a minor problem, although I do admit it's a problem.
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Chrome does a reasonable job of translation, when necessary. You can look at the "Subject" and tell whether it is anything you are interested in.
I would not let the language issue discourage me, if I have my hands on an excellent operating system. But it is true that other English speakers are put off when they see a foreign language. That is too bad. Over these 6 or 8 years I have never seen a problem written in English fail to get an answer, in English. The fact that most of the devs are native German speakers is a silly reason to pass by such a nice distribution, IMHO.
The issue goes both ways, btw. An English speaker reported a failure to boot linux-image-4.18.10-towo.2-siduction-amd64 on 27 SEP. There was a considerable discussion because some users had the problem and some did not.
A German speaker noticed the same problem on 29 SEP and did not recognize that it was already posted in English, so a new thread was started in German, which devil ended up linking back to the English thread where towo had already informed us that there was an upstream regression and that particular kernel was not reliable.
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This is exactly the point: of course problems in English get quickly and willingfully addressed by the community, but a newcomer may feel turned off looking at the forum for the first time.
Yesterday, before writing I had a look at "last posts" section (although I read "letzte posts" as I like the UI in German ahahah) and literally "counting" the messages, there were just 1-2 in English out of every 10.
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@dibl, if my German was half as good as devil's or melmarker's English I would have written it in both languages. Hoever to hopefully make my problem understood by the bilingual dev's as best I could it seemed my native English was the best approach, which as you said devil jumped in and got it all back on track. I also try to understand the frustration on both sides of this problem and just thank the powers that be we have and are blessed with the best rolling release and developer's around! Also a special thanks goes out to all those that keep this forum and the information flowing regardless of the language issue, I take my hat off and salute you all. ;)
tommy2
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Not surprising it is a German distro but all major issues and many others are in english. English is the second language for most of the world and certainly computing I could see it may be inhibiting new users. I use https://www.deepl.com/translator to check out any interesting threads.
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... there were just 1-2 in English out of every 10.
Hmmmmmmmm. Possibly the English speakers are more proficient with their Linux systems .....
;-)
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Orrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, they understand more than they are will to admit!!! ;)
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For all seeking help with translation I second @titan's suggestion to use deepl.
Very comfortable in an extra tab ;)
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Several years ago I worked for a short time in a German department of a Texan IT company in ProSupport for German speaking countries. Apart from the small separate area for Eastern Europe, only Germans worked there. Nevertheless, all written communication was done in English, even if the colleague sat less than 2 meters away. Also the log files of the conversations with German-speaking customers...
Insane reason: the big boss in Round Rock might like to read something...
The most members of the core team (and certainly most users) of siduction are Germans...
SalentOS is a small sympathetic Linux distribution from South-East Italy with a historical Greek touch. If I would want to use them, I would have to accept their blog, wiki and forum in Italian language. But similar to siduction there is also an english subforum. Also and not exclusively.
I also drive Antergos, a Galician (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_(Spain)) distribution, based on ARCH. There are only 2.4 million native speakers (and few will use Linux), website and forum are in English - but not exclusive. There are 11 subforums in other languages.
Yes, the communication language in IT is English (I am a virtuoso writer of German texts, but I like American English and exclusively use us-en installations myself).
But we don't necessarily want a modern variant of the red British line of a Cecil Rhodes. What I mean by this is, that a small look beyond the linguistic horizon would certainly do some people good. It's interesting in any case.
The most important thing on siduction.org is also dealt with in English. So don't be afraid of the German - no angst (the adoption of one of many German words into the English language)! ;-)
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I'm one of the ones where I don't let language bother me, just another adventure :)
piper = American/Canadian slang (swearing, drooling,) .. US
Mrs.piper = proper queens english (no swearing) .. UK
I also use https://www.deepl.com/translator
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I looked at deepl myself. I'm gonna keep it bookmarked and see how it works. Thanks to titan for the recommendation.
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I guess that siduction will never become a german only distro - even it will not become an english only distro - irc and forum included. The reason is simple: Some german users didn' t read and write english well, the most english users don't speak german. Thats it, we have to deal with. But i would beg to take a diffenernt pov: We, both german and english speakers are a bit privileged, we are able ask and discuss things in our mothers tongue - at least one part can do - please think of italian, french, russian etc users. For them it is harder than for us. :)
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I guess that siduction will never become a german only distro - even it will not become an english only distro - irc and forum included. The reason is simple: Some german users didn' t read and write english well, the most english users don't speak german. Thats it, we have to deal with. But i would beg to take a diffenernt pov: We, both german and english speakers are a bit privileged, we are able ask and discuss things in our mothers tongue - at least one part can do - please think of italian, french, russian etc users. For them it is harder than for us. :)
Yes I would like everything in Swedish, på svenska ;)
I think this discussion has been up before, could be that I did it, Idon't remember. But anyway, it's working for us so keep going.
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What might drive some US users away is the fact that they come into our English IRC room at times when we sleep and no one answers. That used to be better years ago with sidux, when we had a bigger population of EN speakers lurking. But that is what it is, nothing to be done about it :(
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I just found a useful Firefox extension for DeepL translations. Fairly simple, just right-click on selected text and choose "Translate this" and it pops up the translation in a notify box (unfortunately not right next to the selection).It's not as functional as my old favourite gTranslate extension which is deprecated, but DeepL translations are definitely better than Google.
Deep Translator - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/deep-translator/ (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/deep-translator/)
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+1 for DeepL
It does have a website for those who do not use Firefox regularly
https://www.deepl.com/translator
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@sunrat
Danke dafür
Thanks for that
:)
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That's what I use I tried the app but thought it was slower, I just keep it open in a tab.
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germany conquering a linux distro
sounds like ww3 to me
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It does have a website for those who do not use Firefox regularly
It has a Chrome extension also: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/deepl-translator/fjokdddhdjnpombkijbljbeemdmajgfj
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@david - we don't have to conquer it - we founded it (mostly german) and decided to share it with the world without war. And the funny thing is: It works.
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blod og bakken, brødre.