[Ubuntu-ch] Language

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi all,

First, sorry for top posting, but this is more a statement than a
individual response so it makes sense.
Second: this mail is rather long, but I think it's important to
address a few points

We are absolutely aware that we have a tricky situation in
Switzerland, but the problem is well known and rather difficult to
address. Unless other country teams within Ubuntu, we have never been
a language oriented team in the first place, but more a social
organisation gathering to spread the K/X/Ed/Ubuntu love in
Switzerland. The choice is difficult to make, but we didn't want to
interfere with the already existing French, German and Italian
speaking communities and, knowing that there already are language
specific mailing lists, IRC channels and forums, creating another set
of language specific media would have been counterproductive.

There are a few evident reasons for that:

- language teams not only are specific to a country but also for a
language, splitting this up means loosing focus. Personally I
witnessed too often this manpower splitting in Switzerland, always
with negative results and think it's important to have a place where
everybody can participate, regardless their mother tongue or cultural
background.

- due to it's geographic particularities, Switzerland has always had a
terrible tendency to isolate itself and isolation within it's regions
is still happening, a fact that is sad to observe in the 21st century,
as it does not contribute to the coherence of the country and the
understanding amongst the various cultural groups. Also, we are
talking about technology and IMHO it's very strange to hear
oppositions to English, the leading language in this particular field.

- The SwissTeam has been founded to spread the love in ALL the
country, regardless the languages and cultural diversity. Also, not
everybody living in Switzerland is Swiss nor does everybody speak all
the languages, but from what I know about education in Switzerland (I
was a teacher for almost 20 years), English is widely available and
accessible to everybody.

- support is available through the Ubunteros who subscribed in the
wiki, indicating their particular skills, region and languages so
there is no reason to fear that somebody wouldn't find help if needed.

- We are well aware that many do participate in other mailing lists,
channels or forums, but keep in mind that if you want to help
Switzerland, it's not by supporting the GermanTeam who is only active
in Germany, ditto for the FrenchTeam and the ItalianTeam. If somebody
wants to help out in Switzerland we need a central meeting point. Of
course, the existence of Switzerland specific groups in German, French
or Italian forums is a plus, but there already is a Swiss multilingual
forum available, namely Swisslinux.ch where all the different
distributions find their space, ditto for the languages. Again, it's
about avoiding to split manpower...

- GNU/Linux and its various distributions are international projects,
so IMHO it's not bad for everybody to learn and improve their skills,
be it linguistic or technical, and why not do this within this
particular team?

- There are language specific groups available, so nobody is forced to
converse in English if it's so difficult, but don't forget that
English is one of the most widely used languages in the world (yes, I
know about Chinese!) and collaboration in the Ubuntu SwissTeam is also
collaborating in a worldwide community, if we want to share and
participate English is mandatory.

Of course we can improve the current situation, but in the preparation
of the upcoming release party I got aware that we still are a very
small group, despite the many subscribed users in Launchpad and the 65
Ubunteros on the wiki. When we call for help, there are not many to
step up to give a hand... An example: we were asked to do release
parties in French and German speaking parts of Switzerland which
worked well the first time, but seems to be far more difficult to set
up a second time, again a manpower issue. The current result is one
single release party in Zürich, nothing in the Suisse romande and I
don't even mention Ticino and Grischun...

Again, if somebody is not at ease in English, it's not a reason to
step back.I have seen many people participate in the Swiss Team,
regardless their language skills, geographical location or technical
ability, it's all about sharing. Remember what Ubuntu stands for?

One suggestion: if you write in another language, please translate
your mail with the available tools (translate.google.com for example)
and copy-paste the result in your mail. We are well aware that it's
far from perfect, but at least everybody gets a chance to understand
the topic. Even if more than 70% of the Swiss speak German, we have
quite some folks on this list who don't, and these are not amongst the
least active in the team.

Of course, the above is mainly my opinion but I know it's shared by
others in the team and we are of course open to discussion about ways
to improve the current situation. So much for herding cats...


Greets

Myriam

PS. If somebody doesn't understand this mail, I'm willing to explain
it in German, French or Italian.

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