Wednesday April 06, 2005

Oh no! Not Myth #8! Anything but Myth #8! ...Anything? ...OK, Myth #8

And now, we examine our heads, no, navels, no no, myths, we examine our myths (OK, can you tell I'm getting a little punchy here?):

"Administration interfaces don't need internationalization."

'Cause all sys admins everywhere speak, read, and write English fluently, don't they? You know, the funniest thing about this myth is that it's so often repeated, but I have yet to find any data, study, customer interview, or even efforts to obtain such, to support this myth. Maybe it's a mantra. In any case, the hard facts are that many admins are not that comfortable with English, or in some cases they don't know any at all. If you're charged with keeping a company's systems up and running, how keen are you to do that in an interface that is a second language? I thought so. Nothing like a message popping up on the screen with "Floozid iyarkaba panic gotrios piwec shutdown worqas!!" and there you are, madly flipping through your Cloqrat => English dictionary, trying to remember the conjugation of the verb gotrasco. And then more messages come flying across the screen...

The point being that admins are humans, just like you, and language has meaning for them too. They're going to function a lot better in a native language than in a second language, just like you. Here at Sun, we translate our admin interfaces (if you're at Sun and you're surprised, well, check it out). And this actually leads into another myth, which I'll post at a later date, namely "We've never localized this before."

}sigh{

( Apr 06 2005, 09:00:10 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]