chris hofmann wrote:
> Robert Kaiser wrote:
>> Gen Kanai wrote:
>>> Again, your focus on percentage of usage is, in my opinion, a poor
>>> metric for a number of reasons. It's more important that people can get
>>> Firefox in languages that Microsoft will never support like the 11
>>> languages of South Africa that Dwayne and the Translate.org.za folks
>>> have helped make a reality. In many ways it is the smallest communities
>>> which are the most important as they are the most marginalized- by the
>>> percentage metric as well.
>> This also applies to Michael's efforts on the Sorbian languages, or
>> even Esperanto, by the way. People native to languages like Sorbian
>> usually speak another language (like German in this case) fluently,
>> and they are small groups, so a for-profit endeavour like MS's will
>> never support them in the way our contributors can.
>> The question is if we statistics are about "how much of the population
>> can we reach?" or about "how many people do we support with software
>> in their own native language?"
> The later question is a lot more interesting to me, and beyond that the
> question "how many more *could* we reach by the addition of each new
> incremental locale addition?" should get more attention.
> That would help to set up a priority list and discussion of what new
> locales would be most valuable to add. Hindi, es-mx, and others are
> great places where I think we could fill gaps to improve the experience
> for users with new locales or "tuned" versions that better fit the needs
> of users globally, and in specific areas, but we could use more analysis
> to back up those ideas.
> From that we could recruit and help organize those locales to get off
> the ground and shipping for upcoming releases.
I'm generally skeptical on recruiting localization teams. To me, users
benefit from a growing community, and they get hardly anything from a
one-time effort.
There is historical evidence that the recruiting we've done in the area
of localization hasn't really achieved growing communities, and they we
got stuck with one-time efforts, relatively short-lived ones, even.
So before we head out and make a priority list, we should make sure that
we're spending out limited resources on the right thing. The right thing
is to get users a sustained on-line life with mozilla, the wrong thing
is to make marks on the wall and just count languages.
Understanding how complex the creation and maintainance of a particular
localization should be is another point, as is making sure that people
actually find the localizations they're looking for.
We're testing the limits of our ecosystem at various ends, and we
shouldn't just test them, but expand them. But at the same time, "let's
have a binary for those" isn't always the answer to the question.
I'm feeling fine to call that "return of investment", not just from our
side, but from the side of the community as well.
Axel
