Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software

This is why my company decided to go with a logging/messaging mechanism that stores messages by ID with parameters. We can get a log file from customers in France who see the error message in French, but we can read their log file in English because it's in a neutral format.<p>This isn't a panacea, as it means that there's a bit more work involved to integrate with tools like Splunk, and we obviously don't log to anything like syslog. But it makes it easier for our support people to support customers who prefer to see their messages in their native language.

I know the blog is to help people learn English, but isn't that antithetical to helping non-English speakers learn how to use computers?<p>Shouldn't we instead be contributing to non-English documentation so that even those who are too poor to learn English, can still learn to use a computer? Ubuntu is doing this beautifully.

That's why I write my code (var and function names, comments) in English. First, it meshes nicely with the rest of the language, keywords specially. Second, the most important docs, books, forums, wikis, mailing lists, etc are in English.

I'm from Italy and I have a macbook with italian keyboard. Still I switched to the english layout because software and usability is designed for english people and english keyboards.

Actually you should switch to software that keeps localization in configuration space instead of code, allowing you to switch languages on a per-user, per-program or per-session.<p>Having user-targeted messages hard coded is a bug.

Hard to agree as people from other countries may poorly understand English.<p>That's a big problem to learn computer in foreign language (If you had context menu with items: Afgdfguw, Eetgreg, Uga, Boo, which would you choose?)<p>If problems occur then, anyway, regular users are not those who would try and would fix them.<p>For an advanced user, sure, use language you want. And if you choose your native language and if you can't find a solution to your trouble, try different keywords. Or reinstall nVidia driver in english version.<p>English speakers will have a hard time to understand this.

I use Ubuntu in French and I find the translations to be in a pretty good shape. When I get an error message then I just use the command line to launch the same program in English: LC_ALL=en_US program. Works pretty well.<p>Recently I switched my parents to a Romanian version of Ubuntu and I was pretty disappointed with the state of translations. Bad wording, inconsistent translations, partial translations etc. But English is not an option for my parents. For now I try to identify translation problems and contribute patches to fix them.

Another small example of the network effect increasing the dominance of the already-dominant language.

Seems the author never try any software/website originally written in languages other than English. Then, the English version is usually awful to use or get help ...<p>And the issue is primarily due to the large online population and knowledge base of English-speaking people. You can find enough info about any topic if such population exists, i.e. I found a lot info about linux in German language, probably due to popularity of the OS in Germany.

Google does some automatic translation of common terms and provides an option to search for pages in different languages. If this feature improves, this advice could soon become obsolete.<p>Anyway, one reason for using English versions is that localizations are often rather strange and that GUIs or less well tested. It can easily happen that a text doesn't really fit into the space that was left for the English message.

Interesting that for debugging purpose only, the author considers that one should use the software stack in English only. I am sorry, but the wonder of humanity is coming from our differences. I speak French, German, English and Danish, each language allows me to think/reflect on different themes differently. I can express some concepts in German with one word for example "Schadenfreude" which would require a complete sentence in French.<p>Now imagine, you are deep into doing some work in German and you need to switch all the time between your "German" work and your "English" tools because your computer may crash and you may need to copy/paste an error message in a search engine. This is a usability disaster. I am really surprised that lot of HN readers are supporting such idea when at the same time the majority of people here have high praise for good design and usability.

You should use software in the language of its authors, given that you speak it, of course. This language just happens be English most of the time. Localization is, in my experience, almost always poorly done.

Summary: human languages have network effects too, and using one of the more popular ones may have benefits.

I'd go as far as to say everyone should just move to English for everything, not just Operating Systems.

Heh, I moved to Poland three months ago from my native England, and the one thing that's really helping me with the language is setting my Windows installation to be in Polish.<p>Note: I guess this step isn't necessary if, unlike me, you don't suck at learning languages ;)

This is very true. I actually try to reverse translate lots of error messages back to English when googling for help. It's not always easy to get the correct wording however.

What is really better - is to set up google search preferences to search in English language, instead of auto-detected by GEO-location or your browser's language settings.<p>You will be surprised by the huge difference in search results when you forces google to search only in English.<p>Also try to read English language news instead of your native. You will discover, that world is much bigger than those biased and poorly translated articles you can found on a popular localized sites.

So I got a Mac.<p>Now seriously: that's not a real reason to use the whole system in English. I do that (except for the keyboard layout, I love the Spanish one &#60;3), but I don't think I anyone should ever do it if they don't really like/feel comfortable to. Translations are very good, so that wouldn't be a reason... and IMHO what the post describes is an acceptable risk (hey, you probably will get sorted of this, but will have to Google more than a few minutes).