Re: A system for localizing documentation strings

[Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp>]

On 27 juil. 07, at 21:07, Kenichi Handa wrote:

> In article <ur6mudrli.fsf@gnu.org>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>  
> writes:
>
>>> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp>
>>> Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:22:46 +0900
>>>
>>> There is absolutely _no_ need whatsoever for Japanese people to  
>>> learn
>>> _any_ bit of English to become excellent programmers.
>
>> Handa-san, could you please give us your perspective on this
>> assertion?
>
> To become an excellent programmer, one must read a code
> written by the other people, and for that, English is
> mandatory.  Not only comments, but also function names,
> variable names, etc. are mostly based on English words.

This is not about learning English, this is about remembering what  
code means. I.e. This is about assigning arbitrary signs some  
signification. As for code itself, there is nothing more remote from  
English than _code_.

>   If
> they are all some random alphabets something like
> "lkvkdloa", it's almost impossible to track codes.  In
> addition, one have to communicate with people working on the
> same fields, and if you are working on a program used
> world-widely, the developper community almost always uses
> English.

You are talking about a special class of developers. Most excellent  
programmers work in companies where they don't need to communicate  
with the "international community". People who maintain complex cobol  
systems in banking or insurance companies have most probably no use  
for English at all.
  What you describe is good for researchers or for high profile  
company employes (who may not be excellent programmers anyway).  And  
as a counter example, I'd argue that the ruby community in Japan has  
nothing to do with English at all, because _they_ are the experts.


> As for computer/programming related books, it's sure that
> most important ones are translated in Japanese.

Not only that but bookstores are full of high level books that are  
directly written in Japanese by Japanese experts.

>   But, most
> of them assumes that a reader has some basic knowledge about
> English.  Many technical terms are just written in Katakana
> (a phonetic transliteration from the orignal English word),
> and one has to know the meaning of original English word.

Of course not. Most words in katakana are already part of the CS  
jargon in Japanese. What you pretend is equivalent to say that to  
read a recipe book in Japanese one must know French because the  
technics used have katakana words that come from French. But the  
truth is that all those words have specific meanings that people who  
are involved with this subset of Japanese know from using them daily - 
without having to understand a single bit of French, except for "bon  
apétit"...


Jean-Christophe Helary