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Linux Software

Brazilian Linux Users Want Better Documentation 60

Posted by Roblimo from the same-the-whole-world-over dept.
brazilian brain writes "Did you know that users don't like the inclusion of payware bundled with our everyday's "official" Linux distributions? And that they need an User's Guide more than an Install Guide? Linux in Brazil ran a poll for 30 days, asking what users expected from the next editions of their preferred distributions, and discovered these facts - and many more." (Poll results have been translated to English; the rest of the site is in Portugese)
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Brazilian Linux Users Want Better Documentation More

Brazilian Linux Users Want Better Documentation

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  • Confusing (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A bit hard to decipher the statistics (mostly because they are not sorted). The multi-level nature of the results are confusing (percentage and med, high, low grades). "Software classes"... what?

  • I recall a (longish) while ago that someone had developed a system for doing a partial translation of text to an grammatically strict 'intermediate' format.

    The idea (IIRC) was to allow translation to a different language using an essential subset of the vocabulary (i.e. no fancy language) -- and you could check the accuracy of the meaning of the 'intermediate' format by translating the document back to your own language, correcting it, and going round again (and once you have a proper round trip you are done.)

    Such an idea would allow (given language 'generators') for documentation to be put into a language neutral format, and (in the absence of a 'properly' translated version) translate that into the language of the reader.


    John
  • There is at least 2 brazilian distributions which are in Portuguese, and the documentation usually is acceptable
  • Not dumb at all. Actually I think this is a great idea. One condition for this to happen of course would be that contributing to OSS needs to be considered as a sort of charitable act.

    It could be done the other way around too of course. Why not have english-students in non-english speaking countries translate the docs, or have them review the translation that were done in an english-speaking country.

    Sounds great to me.
  • I think the need for translation, while existent, should not be overrated.

    Let's remember that most commercial products started and trived in Brazil without a portuguese version. This includes Windows and all MS Office apps. People who needed to use those would do whatever was necessary to overcome the language barrier.

    There is also the globalization problem. More and more English is becoming the de facto world language. I am not saying that I like it this way, but this is a fact. I would certanly like to have every important book or paper translated to portuguese, but that is not going to happen. So, knowledge of the English language is a modern necessity.
  • As part of the OSS movement, the whole idea is that if something is missing you should act upon it and resolve the need. This seems to be the exact opportunity for some bright young Brazilians to come up with solid Portugese documentation for Linux.

    I'm going to guess that man pages don't translate well into Portugese. How about Babelfishing them? Oy, that'd be a nightmare to try to comprehend its pigeon Portuguese.

    As far as including $$$ products in distros, I believe that it just makes the prices of our favorite distros that much higher. I still can not comprehend why RedHat 6.0 is $89. I can get NT for less. What's the advantage of getting an "official" boxed copy here? However, as long as GPL lives, we cheap bastards can just download the latest version of RH for free.
  • I think that most of the people that answered the poll do know that we have lotsa documentation available freely and in portuguese. Did you notice that 50% of them use Linux for more than 12 months?

    I also think that the point is: *they* think the internationalization/localization/translation effort is valuable, and want more of that.

    Sure enough the ldp-br docs are very fine. And I'm sure the people behind the project will be glad to know that their efforts are being recognized by the user community. And maybe this is just the point...
  • well, they did not translate the packages - they internationalized everything, so you can use any language you want. There isn't even a default language - the install program asks you which language you want, and you can change it later, using the LANG environment variable. If your script want things in some specific language, it can have it.
  • We will take this in mind when the time for another poll come :)
  • I really like your idea. There is already a brazilian documentation project (very active), and if anybody cares, the url is: http://ldp-br.conectiva.com.br/
  • Yes, everybody wants translated documentation. Luckily we brazilians already have, and the poll just shows that we want even more.

    Brazil has teams doing internationalization and translation of many packages and documentation. We already have an excelent distribution - Conectiva Linux, www.conectiva.com.br.

    People that answered the poll and want some internationalization are not crying and begging. I think they are recognizing the excelent job some people concerned about internationalization are doing.
  • try the brazilian version of the Linux Documentation Project: http://ldp-br.conectiva.com.br/
  • It's very simple, people will use software they can understand, and for a lot of people around the world, that means software not in english.

    If Linux won't provide such a solution, that's fine. Microsoft is very considerate of the needs of non english-speaking countries.

    It's sad a day when you get more consideration out of Microsoft than out of an OSS proponent.

    Plenty of OSS is translated, or being translated. I have no problems with English, but prefer Norwegian. After setting up LANG I have got lots of positive surprises from already-translated programs.

    And OSS translation is a lot better than ms translation. Ms seems to use a word list based approach giving some really hideous translations at times, particularly when there are lots of technical terms in the text. OSS translator is not under a regime where "this word should always translate to that" which fails spectacularly when languages don't have a 1 to 1 mapping.

    Another problem with the ms approach is that they translate their own products and thats it. Other vendors of windows programs doesn't translate that much. With OSS any program can be translated by anybody, I can even do it myself if I so wish.

  • As someone else has already pointed out, Conectiva is the biggest Linux seller around here. And, whaddayaknow, they have already translated the LDP User's Guide, Netadmin's Guide, Sysadmin's Guide, etc., and sell it on bookstores. And because of the original LDP licenses, the Portuguese translations can be freely copied and redistributed. So it's a moot point; if they really wanted to know something, they would go out and buy/copy it.
  • This is a serious question and maybe I'm fairly naive but has english really become that widespread in the computer industry that you're missing the boat if you haven't learned it? This seems kind of arogant on the part of us english speakers. I guess since we have so much tech industry here now, it's flipped from the way of the 80's when Japanese was the language to know for business.

  • It could be done the other way around too of course. Why not have english-students in non-english speaking countries translate the docs, or have them review the translation that were done in an english-speaking country.

    This is key. As someone who is currently learning French, I would be happy to donate some time towards translating some sort of documentation (any sort) into French. But I don't have any confidence in my ability to write good, colloquial French. On the other hand, I do trust in the ability of a native French-speaker who knows only a bit of English to write good, colloquial French.

    What we need is some sort of pairing between native speakers of both the source and destination language, each able to speak the other to some degree. Each one can work on the translation; the native speaker of the source language can explain nasty idioms in the existing docs, while the native speaker of the destination language can skim over and smooth out the rough edges in the docs translated by the other person. Great translations without having to find the somewhat rarer perfectly bilingual person. The best of both worlds, n'est-ce pas?

  • I like to know where in the world you can get a full version of Nt for less than $89. I know a few software site, can't remember the names, that sell copies of Red Hat for about $10. They just grab RH from the web site and burn a copy for everyone.

    Not everyone can download Red Hat either. Linux is large is you download everything and beginners really don't know what to get. Some a box copy is a good way to get RH and other Linux distributions out to more people.
  • English maybe popular but other languages are just as important. Cutting out groups of people because they don't know a language just ain't right. Its just another form of discrimination.
  • WindowMaker: 17%
    gnome+WindowMaker: 16%

    WindoMaker got just as close.
  • yeah..try linux.com and click on chat..theres a coupla room fulls of help waiting for newbies online on IRC,.
  • isnt that what esperanto is trying to achieve ? A language which could be used to convert rapidly from one language to the next without having to learn either of those languages..i.e. learn esperanto and youre all set with *any* language. or maybe im thinking of something different....
  • Hey,

    Keep in mind that in Brazil the average person does not speak a 2nd language even fairly well.
    Ironically enough in South America, most countries are spanish speaking. Yet Braszil has a problem with even that. The main thing is that with countries who's citizens are either too lazy to learn a 2nd language, even if most of the continent or world is capable of reasonable communication in that language, then it's a circular discussion - ultimately. There will be many excuses why they need not learn another language; I've been thru quite a few of those "discussions", and they are VERY one-sided and boring.

    A 2nd, and sometimes 3rd known language, even if not fluently spoken; but reasonable enough to be understood by most, is always a good thing.
  • Hey,

    Keep in mind that in Brazil the average person does not speak a 2nd language even fairly well.
    Ironically enough in South America, most countries are spanish speaking. Yet Brazil has a problem
    with even that. The main thing is that with countries who's citizens are either too lazy to learn a 2nd
    language, even if most of the continent or world is capable of reasonable communication in that
    language, then it's a circular discussion - ultimately. There will be many excuses why they need not
    learn another language; I've been thru quite a few of those "discussions", and they are VERY
    one-sided and boring.

    A 2nd, and sometimes 3rd known language, even if not fluently spoken; but reasonable enough to
    be understood by most, is always a good thing.
  • Please, stop the conectiva marketing on slashdot.


    Yeah! Let's also ban any mention of Red Hat, Debian, Slackware...

  • I do not think the results confusing at all. The poll shows how the user thinks, instead of pointing the most wanted feature. "Most wanted" things do not work in this field, you need a well-balanced solution.

    Software classes refer to how important the users rate each "class" (type, kind) of software.
  • Let's get some facts straight.

    First, while documentation might be available in portuguese, the messages of the operating system itself are not so easily translated, because the way the operating system is written does little to support it.

    To whom does this matter? Actually, to a lot of people. These people don't know english, and cannot be bothered to learn it. And, guess what?, that's fine, because Microsoft sells stuff to them which is completely in portuguese. Heck, even commercial Unixes like AIX or HP-UX can be set up to be portuguese-only.

    In other words, some things must be changed in the way applications are written to support translation/localization, or Linux will always be relegated to a small share in non english-speaking countries.

    As for the web site, it is in portuguese. It's just that they will sometimes translate some of their pages to english, for the benefit of english-speakers, and that's the page you saw.
  • No correctly written software was broken, that I'm sure of.

    Maybe you ought to familiarize yourself with things like the LANG environment variable?
  • All IBM software I have ever seen (in the 90s, at least) can "speak" portuguese fine, thank you. It's very simple, people will use software they can understand, and for a lot of people around the world, that means software not in english.

    If Linux won't provide such a solution, that's fine. Microsoft is very considerate of the needs of non english-speaking countries.

    It's sad a day when you get more consideration out of Microsoft than out of an OSS proponent.

  • Not true (Score:1)

    by dcs ( 42578 )
    To be candid, that's just not true.

    Most people working in the information business in Brazil don't know english, and that's that. And, guess what? They can get jobs fine, thank you. And why not? AIX, HP-UX, MS Windows (95/98/NT/2000) are all available in portuguese.

    I wonder how the japanese managed to become the world's second largest economy (with a relatively small population) from the ashes that they were left with after WWII in just three decades, when EVERYTHING they have is in japanese. English usage? Nil.

    I also wonder why every big software company translates all their software into dozens of other languages.

    Maybe... maybe it just might be you are wrong?
  • Let's remember that most commercial products started and trived in Brazil without a portuguese version.


    ...and yet, the explosion of computer usage had to wait for portuguese versions of such software. Remember when brazilian text processors competed well, thank you, with imported ones? Do you remember how that changed when software like MS Word was localized?


    We'll first see the day when machine-translation becomes widespread than have large populations become english-proficient (that is, non english-speaking large populations).


    Don't get me wrong, I think anyone who won't read english in these days is an idiot, but, surprisingly, that doesn't seem to change the world one bit.

  • There are a few things that could have skewed the data:
    • Only 3% of the people polled don't use linux, so the people who were polled naturally have a greater need for User manuals than Installation manuals. People who have tried to install linux but gave up during the installation process are probably not represented well.
    • Do you like the inclusion of payware in the distributions? The only two possible answers were yes or no. If someone wanted to answer don't care, they'd probably be more inclined to answer no due to the anti-commercial feelings that go along with linux.
  • There is the LDP-BR, Linux Documentation Project - Brazil. You can find it at: http://ldp-br.conectiva.com.br/ Good Luck
  • Since I am a Linux user in a small country I had to live with that fact that the documentation is not going to be translated for everyone.

    Linux is free and therefore I think that you, who use it should know english and read the documentation in english.

    Ofcourse if you find someone who wants to translate the docs for you. It's ok but why should the distributors spend valuable time writing docs for user who cant read english. This time could be used, coding better OS.

    I live in Iceland and therefore I have to be able to read english. Ofcourse I would rather like to read the linux docs in my own language but thats not an option.

    Many newspapers and computer magazines have been publishing a linux tutorial in all kinds og languages. Read them and then read the faqs and howtos.

  • Don't get me wrong, I think anyone who won't read english in these days is an idiot, but, surprisingly, that doesn't seem to change the world one bit.

    Amen to that.

    Well, I think we have to consider several aspects here. In the old days (meaning 15-25 years ago) every Brazilian computer professional could read English, even if badly... there were no localized operating systems or applications, except for some coded from the ground up in Portuguese. So somebody who didn't understand some English was handicapped.

    (As a curiosity, when System 1.0 came out with the first Macs, I translated the System, MacPaint and MacWrite - and soon after, Microsoft Word 1.0 - and sent the translations to the company which at the time represented both Apple and Microsoft in Brazil. They replied there would be interest for this.)

    Now, we're talking about two different user populations. Computer professionals IMHO still have to read English, not only because serious developer packages haven't been localized - or when they've been, there was little interest from programmers - but also because of the Internet. Finding and reading documentation from software and hardware companies is nearly impossible if you don't read English. OTOH, casual users and professionals in non-computer fields need localized software, OSes and documentation... but their numbers have been significant only recently.

    What I'd call "fast-track" computer professionals - people that come from a 15-day Visual Basic course and/or have read about Linux in the magazines and wish to jump onto the bandwagon - unfortunately want get the benefits without having to learn anything significant. I agree, anyone who doesn't want to learn English nowadays is an idiot... but if he also wishes to learn Linux, he's hopeless. Better raise the bar on these guys by refusing to localize Linux at all :-)

    But it's an art to localize programs properly. I've had occasions to use OSes and applications in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and Italian (all of which I understand to a degree) and at least half of the translations suck badly - even to the point of overflowing dialog boxes or even crashing. You can't just point students at software and tell them to translate stuff...

    ...and even worse, most of the technical words don't have non-English equivalents, or at least shouldn't have. Some of us still laugh at Prof. Zuffo (from São Paulo IIRC), who in the late 70s made a point of translating everything, and inventing words when there weren't any... it was ridiculous and unintelligible to whoever was familiar with the English terms. Look at what this sort of nationalism did to the French... software (and nearly everything else) has to be localized by law, AFAIK.

    Finally, someone mentioned Babelfish -forget that. It's good only for laughs and casual newsreading. If you need technically reliable info, it's unusable unless you know the language it's translating from already.

  • If they need it transulated maybe what needs to happen is someone needs to run the documentation thru Bablefish or something like that, and transulate all of it, or use some form of unicode document interface so that it can be read by them. Not being from Brazil, I can't say how good the transulations are or even if they exist.

    I have installed several distributions: Redhat, Slackware, SuSE, debian, and TurboLinux. TurboLinux and debian were the more difficult for me. To install them you really aught to know what programs you want to install and know more about your Linux distribution, other wise you'll either go thru lots of dependance resolving or miss dependancies and have problems, if you ignore the dependancies.

    I personally thought that the GUI for Redhat was not that difficult to use. Caldera is supposed to have a GUI, and SuSE was rather easy to me also.

    I also think in time it will get easier to install. The documentation will get to be better, there will be more apps. I hope that this does not turn people who have used Linux for a while off thou.

    The fact is that English seems to be the 'accepted default language'. Yes developers devlop all around the world, but both Linus and Alan do stuff in English. Yes Linus is Finnish, but he lives in the US now I believe. Thus most of the kernel is going to be in English. There is Geman docs out there and I am sure SuSE helps out there. There are other languages supported by some of the distributions, but I think that until there is a distribution that actually comes from Brazil they may end up suffering. Even the web site there was in English.

  • For my part, if I'm trying to figure out a program, I'll go in this order:
    1. man pages
    2. info pages if neccessary
    3. included documentation (/usr/doc etc.)
    4. website for the program (found through Google [google.com])
    5. links from the homepage
    6. search on Google for other pages
    7. usenet archives at Dejanews [deja.com]
    8. ask on usenet. never gotten to this one.

    If I'm trying to figure out how to do something, I go in a different order:

    1. apropos
    2. HOWTOs
    3. websearch
    4. usenet archives
    5. ask on usenet. once again, haven't had to

    I've been using Linux for around 4 months now, so a near-newbie as of yet. Once I started, though, I didn't go back (ever).

    Anyone have any better suggestions?


    ---
  • You can't compare WindowMaker to Gnome and KDE. They are completely different things. You could compare WM to Enlightenment or KWM, since those are the same product set, but Gnome and KDE are meant to be 'desktop environments', whereas WindowMaker is a window manager.
    ---

  • An Idea...? (Score:3)

    by scenic ( 4226 ) <sujal@@@sujal...net> on Sunday September 19, 1999 @02:27AM (#1674477) Homepage Journal
    I was just sort of thinking about this and was wondering how many schools in English speaking countries have Portuguese departments or how many schools in portuguese speaking countries have english departments.

    I went to Johns Hopkins [jhu.edu], where they offered business and scientific french classes, and probably spanish as well (I don't remember, since I took French). I wonder if it would be possible to ask students taking those classes to translate the documentation and work on maintaining it. I mean, if you look at the sheer number of language students out there, there are sure to be enough that have the aptitude to translate technical documents, as well as the time to either volunteer to do it, or maybe do it for credit that they can get out of their departments.

    For those of you still in college, this is something worth investigating. It would give them a great way to practice learning the language while helping the Linux community out.

    Of course, this could just be a dumb idea, which I'm sure you'll let me know soon enough. :-)

    Sujal

  • Not so easy... (Score:3)

    by dcs ( 42578 ) on Sunday September 19, 1999 @06:42AM (#1674478)
    Translation is hard and ungrateful work, and the people who need it doesn't know how to do it. That's very different from kernel hacking, where there is people who know how to do what is lacking, and even from documentation, where people write stuff based on their learning experiences (which can be based on irc/mailing lists).


    Alas, that's not the whole problem. Each time a programmer uses a message string embedded in the program (in the C source), he makes it harder to translate the software. What are people supposed to do? Go through all source files and change each message by hand? And then what, have a "pt-BR" distribution, with different binaries?


    If the OSS operating systems are ever going to get on par with the commercial operating systems, they need to standarize on message tables, so that changing language does not require recompiling anything, and supports even multiple languages at the same time (with the time-honored LANG environment variable).

  • don't we all; perhaps we should look at ourselves (Score:3)

    by swonkdog ( 70409 ) on Sunday September 19, 1999 @02:10AM (#1674479)
    so, they want documentation in portuguese. we all would like documentation in our native language (luckily mine is english). unfortunately, it is so hard to find people who want to document, and even more unfortunate is that the oss community at large has this tendancy to invite people in and then make the people who do not code feel inferior. i understand that code is what make the world go 'round and that is why i code. but, some people either cannot or do not want to code, but they *do* want to document. how many portuguese/english bilingual people do you think may have wanted to document but were driven off because they do not code. i am willing to bet quite a few. i hate to make this a soapbox on our treatment of people, but you have the reason right there, sometimes the truth hurts, but, there it is...
    on the subject of needing a gui install. it is difficult to program a gui and the textbased installs work just fine.

  • Which docs do they use already? (Score:3)

    by Stonehand ( 71085 ) on Sunday September 19, 1999 @02:06AM (#1674480) Homepage
    It might have been interesting if they had also polled to see which sources of information are used (and in what order, if possible). At least on Usenet, there are an awful lot of questions that keep coming up, over and over and over, suggesting that Usenet appears to be a darn-near-first resource for some...

    The sources that come to mind include, in no particular order:

    * The LDP guides (esp. the _User's Guide_, since apparently stuff like that was wanted).
    * The HOWTOs.
    * man/info/... pages.
    * Vendor-supplied documentation (installation manuals and so forth).
    * Third-party books, on Linux or Unix in general.
    * Other people (*nix-using friends), such as in LUGs.
    * Web resources (hardware databases, and so forth)
    * Usenet / Usenet archives (deja) / Usenet FAQ archives (rtfm.mit.edu)

    For somebody who doesn't know any *nix-using people and doesn't have a background in CLI archives, nor in hunting down scraps of info w/ Google and company, a list could be rather important...

  • The opinion of a brazilian (Score:4)

    by Karpe ( 1147 ) on Sunday September 19, 1999 @02:49AM (#1674481) Homepage
    As a brazilian, I would like to share with you my opinions on the subject.

    In Brazil, there was a boom in the media about Linux, specially because of a company called Conectiva wich sells a translated and adapted version of RedHat Linux. This company has grown a lot and fast. Now, you can buy Linux in any bookstore, software shop, etc.

    This caused a *lot* of people to start using Linux, which is great, but this people don't have the habit of reading to much.

    Conectiva supports 2 mailing lists, ldp-br, lie-br, which discuss and work on translation of HOW-TOs, man pages and on internationalization of software. I subscribe to them, and every now and then there is a guy asking how to configure his modem and such. Sometimes, I think if it really is worthy to translate documentation to these people. But then I wait, and don't think anymore about it, and keep working! :)

    To conclude, there are a lot of documentation out there, and these people just don't like to read. They don't like to translate also. They expect that a big company will guide them by the hand.

    As a friend of mine says, when someone switches from Windows to Linux, they are switching from a slingshot to a canon. And a canon can be very nasty if yu don't know how to handle it.

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