xml-dev - RE: Foreign Names

[Eldar Musayev <eldarm@microsoft.com>]

 > From: Philip Nye [mailto:philipnye@freenet.co.uk]
 > "Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
 > > 
 > > >> ...  In Korea, for example,
 > > >> English is everywhere and most Koreans can recognize 
 > the words even if
 > > >> they can't pronounce them.
 > The only reason a Korean _might_ understand the English more readily
 > than vice versa it that they are forced to get more practice. The
 > question seems to boil down to whether this situation should be
 > reinforced or not.

Well, you probably missing the point. When I see XML document,
I don't care what the words naturally mean 
in the native (for exanmple, English) language,
I am only concerned with the value in this particular XML app
(or C, VB, Java program - there it's the same) If I know alphabet and
had _any_ (either right, wrong or extremely wrong, does not matter)
way to pronounce this stuff, I am in. That simple.

So what Simon says is completely correct. 

I can confirm that
on my experience with Russia and Russian software development.
English maybe taught in schools, but overall is pretty poor,
however it completely does not matter when it comes to programming. 
During the Soviet time there was a number of attempts to make
Russian-based programming languages or customize regular programming
languages with Russian, and all they failed. Programmers just despise
them. Really, when you are accustomed to torture some other language
for the technology sake, you don't like to see that with your own,
it sounds unnatural.

I even don't mention that every teenager in Russia knows
at least three alphabets - Russian, Latin (most commonly referred as 
English) and Greek, and usually can read in some Latin-alphabet-based
language. And I believe that's not just Russia. That's what
they call European education there, over the ocean.
And Asian countries also pay a lot of attention to education,
so when it come to development, internationalization efforts 
are often taken too seriously for what they worth.
Important thing is internationalization of interfaces and GUIs.

Regards,

-----
Eldar A. Musayev
eldarm@microsoft.com

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