sankara.me

An article today grabbed my attention today. It brought one nasty aspect of software; language, not the programming one. The article claims it’s important that you use your software and OS in English. The reason specified was very valid and is perfectly practical. But I disagree that everyone should be forced to use English. I’ll list down my view point and “my” opinion on why it is wrong to enforce English as the only language.

The reason as per the article is that a search for an error message might not be futile in your native language. This IMHO is a limitation of the search engine. Search engines should evolve to search by semantics rather than just plain dumb words. And all indications are pointing that each and every search engine is working hard to achieve that goal. I still remember the very first search I did in Yahoo! in the 90s. The results were mostly dumb. We have come a long way from there and we have miles to go indeed. This process can only be accelerated if more and more people start using the web in their native language; the language they feel more comfortable with. Domain names in non-English languages, Unicode as standard encoding format for everything from your source code file to email, more and more blogs and sites in non-English languages, local versions of major sites…etc. indicate we’ll reach there eventually. Asking the whole world to learn English is neither feasible nor acceptable. If information has to reach people who need it the most, language should not be a barrier.

-- Sankara