This post is about consciousness-raising. I would like to talk about something that could use some more attention: the fact that native English speakers are privileged in open source communities, and that they should be more aware of that.
The days of Latin and French as the lingua francas of the world are long over and we all know that English has taken its place. Especially IT is dominated by the language. Virtually all documentation and function naming is done in English, as well as almost all the communication. There are not many languages that have their own words for ‘computer’ or ‘internet’, or ‘software’ and ‘hardware’ for that matter.
It is logically, of course, to use this language now. It makes no sense to try to get everyone to learn Swedish all out of the sudden because we like that better. If you want to successfully communicate online and participate in an open source community you’ll need English. However, this is the cause of a large inequality between native and non-native speakers.
It comes clear when you take a look at what happens when you’re not a proficient English user. When your English isn’t correct:
- people will take you less seriously and treat you more like a child or an ignorant person;
- you find it harder to express yourself and to make your intentions to someone else;
- using it takes more energy and is more frustrating, meaning you’re less likely to use it;
- you’ll be more often misunderstood and/or be considered harsh, causing negative feedback;
- you find it harder to understand documentation, HowTos, blog posts and other community-vital information.
These points all discourage less fluent persons to contribute to discussions, to speak up. This is very clearly demonstrated by the relative high amount of Americans, and other contributors of English speaking countries, in the community, especially in key roles.
The United States with 300 million inhabitants is smaller than geographical Europe with 731 million people, or the EU with 501 million. Still there are many more Americans visible in the open source projects. There are only about 70 million native English speakers in Europe, from Ireland and Great Britain.
But lets start about India, Indonesia and China. All these countries have populations of less or more than one billion people. That is huge! Ubuntu also seems to be very popular there. Still we don’t see as many contributors from those countries as we see from English speaking countries.
Of course there are many factors that have to do with the diversity and origins of the community members. However, this doesn’t explain everything. India, Indonesia, Brazil and China might still be working very hard on making broadband accessible to everyone, but (Western) Europe has mostly far better internet connections than a lot of parts of Northern America.
I think that one very important reason for this is the fact that not everyone speaks good English, and for a lot of people who do speak English using it is still not as simple as using their native language. You can never learn a second language as good as your native language and it does cost a lot of energy for many people to use it when reading, writing, speaking and listening.
That is a barrier to them to contribute to the open source communities, so they stay in their LoCos or hang around a bit in the international community, but don’t do as much as they could or would like to do, because they find it costs too much energy or it too hard to learn or do because of the language. For most voluntary contributors Ubuntu is something they do in their leisure time, as a hobby. When your hobby is mostly hard and not as fun as other things you could do in the same time, it is not hard to decide not to contribute.
This is probably costing us more contributors than gender or race inequality. It is also something that is harder to solve since you can’t take away all problems by simply educating people and raising their consciousnesses. There will always remain a language barrier.
Raising consciousness does help, though. First of all I would like to make all native English speakers realise that they are in fact — every one of them, including those with dyslexia — very privileged over non-native speakers.
Secondly I would like to ask everyone in the community — also the non-native speakers — to take into account someone’s proficiency when reading a mail written in bad English. It might be tempting, unconsciously, to dismiss the email and consider the author as someone who didn’t bother to write it in proper English. However, please consider that this might be the best English of the author. Give the author a chance regardless.
Thirdly I would like to ask everyone in the community to realise how important localisation and translations are, of the interface and the documentation. Americans are very privileged that they have their whole system, from the texts in some obscure application from universe to their default currency, localised by default. They never have to adapt when a certain application is only available in US English, or when a command line calendar is following their historic conversions. Others do.
Checking the Ubuntu community
I wanted to end this post with an overview of the different councils of the Ubuntu community and the countries of origin/native languages of their members. Just read the data and consider it.
Community Council
| name | country of origin | native language(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Alan Pope | United Kingdom | English (UK) |
| Benjamin Mako Hill | United States | English (US) |
| Daniel Holbach | Germany | German |
| Elizabeth Krumbach | United States | English (US) |
| Mark Shuttleworth | South Africa | Afrikaans/English (ZA) (unsure) |
| Matthew East | United Kingdom | English (UK) |
| Mike Basinger | United States | English (US) |
| Richard Johnson | United States | English (US) |
Forum Council
| name | country of origin | native language(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Mike Basinger | United States | English (US) |
| Mike Braniff | New Zealand | English (NZ) |
| Matthew Helmke | United States | English (US) |
| Ryan Troy | United States | English (US) |
| John Dong | United States | English (US) |
| “Bodhi Zazen” | United States | English (US) |
| Isabelle Duchatelle | France | French |
IRC Council
| name | country of origin | native language(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Benjamin Rubin | United States | English (US) |
| Juha Siltala | Finland | Finnish |
| Jussi Schultink | Australia | English (AU) |
| Nathan Handler | United States | English (US) |
| Terence Simpson | United Kingdom | English (UK) |
LoCo Council
| name | country of origin | native language(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Laura Czajkowski | Ireland | English (IE) |
| Alan Pope | United Kingdom | English (UK) |
| Christophe Sauthier | France | French |
| Chris Crisafulli | United States | English (US) |
| Paul Tagliamonte | United States | English (US) |
| Leandro Gómez | Uruguay | Spanish (UY) |
Technical Board
| name | country of origin | native language(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Colin Watson | United Kingdom | English (UK) |
| Kees Cook | United States | English (US) |
| Mark Shuttleworth | South Africa | Afrikaans/English (ZA) (unsure) |
| Martin Pitt | Germany | German |
| Matt Zimmerman | United (unsure) | English (Uu) |
| Scott James Remnant | United (unsure) | English (Uu) |
Disclaimer: this post was not intended as a rant or a personal attack on any community member or council. My goal was to write an eye-opener, not an eye-slammer.
Welcome on my site, I'm Sense Hofstede! Some of you might know me as sense or sehof. I used to be known as qense as well.
You make a very interesting point here. While I was reading this post I found out why I (and my centralamerican fellows) rarely publish posts in the Planet Ubuntu.
Between English and other languages lies the same underlying exclusionary, imperialistic, monopolistic racism supporting propietary software over free software. This will keep cutting out people from accessing new technology and sharing knowledge, despite the promise behind the word "ubuntu". Really nice post! But, as someone unhappily pointed out already, "this is not a democracy"!
Well spoken. The first step toward solving problems is to understand that they exist. Sadly, that doesn't happen nearly often enough.
its going to take a while to achieve one world one language
and in the meantime verbal textual translation software is
really important. very profound observation you have made.
should be read widely. thankyou
You make some excellent points in your article. I am one of those “English Only,” speaking people, having been born in the U.S. But, I’ve been on the receiving end of exactly what you are saying. During my working years, I lived and worked in three other countries in Africa. I consider myself to be fairly proficient in English, having worked as a news editor and writer. During those overseas years, I often felt like the “odd man out,” when I would get together with friends. We were from many nations, several different languages as mother tongues and sometimes the conversation would take strange twists and turns. Perhaps the most humiliating experience was living in an English speaking African nation. I THOUGHT I spoke English…until I discovered that I spoke and wrote AMERICAN English. Many times, English speaking people looked at my writing and could not understand what I was saying. I would use American English words, which at times had a rather different meaning in English, eliciting laughter and at times, blushing faces from my English speaking counterparts. All was taken with good humor, for the most part, but I remember feeling less than fluent in English. I needed a year or to become more proficient in British English and that was living full time, every day, immersed in the language. Tolerance and understanding go a long way and we should all remember that.
A good point. It is something that also came up during a discussion on the #ubuntu-community-team IRC channel: the differences between the different kinds of English that are used around the world can be a cause of confusion and misunderstanding as well.
It can be just that during conferences some people find it hard to understand certain accents, but like you said it can also be the use, or the omissions, of certain words.
When your language doesn't fit in with the rest of the group you stand out. When stand out you feel less part of the group. The helpful atmosphere and the diversity we've already achieved within the Ubuntu community help a great deal to prevent this, but how more diverse the community becomes, how less strange it is to hear all different kinds of English. And when no one's the same everyone's the same, no?
The situation becomes worse when different forms of English are generalized as only English.Like Indian English which is from British English is very different from American English but is still shown as English,This creates confusion and chaos.
Moreover English is my fourth language,so that creates confusion too.
This is a very interesting point. I am a native English speaker from the US, and I have found it interesting that most of the posts on the forums are in English, where there are a ton of Ubuntu users are not English speakers. What are some things that we could do to help make things more inclusive for non-English speakers?
You have to remember that many languages and countries have a forum of their own hosting, which is the case for example for the Finnish Ubuntu LoCo.
And others, as we in the Catalan Loco Team[1], have an own subforum inside the general ubuntuforums (http://cat.ubuntuforums.org). Altough we are less than 10 milion catalan[2] speakers, (obviously not all of us use Ubuntu
) we've got quite good activity in forums, mailing lists, irc channel and organizing global jams, release party and many other FOSS activities. The majority of the hard core (the founders or early members) of the loco team can read, write and speak more or less fluently in english language. There are different levels, of course. There are also members with no or few knowledge of english. But in the rest community, there are plenty of people that don't get a word, because they could'n learn it at school or perhaps, specially the older ones, because before the second language at school was french, not english.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say with this long reply (I'm sorry), is that the author of the article is really right, and that the most efforts you (the ubuntu community and specially the core members of councils and Canonical staff) dedicate to allow non english speakers to get into the game, the most benefit for all.
Thanks for your bright article, Sense.
[1] http://ves.cat/ahFg
[2] http://ves.cat/ahFf
The attitude you're showing here is a great start already. You're aware of 'the problem' and that helps a lot. Take it into account when interacting with people helps a lot to make them feel welcome.
You learn a lot from reading English, but reading hard English can be frustrating of course. When you write hard/beautiful English people will have more trouble understanding it, but they'll learn a lot more from it when it is not too hard. However, it doesn't have to be an English-class of course. The best thing you can do when writing is writing correct English, use punctuation properly (it's a service to the reader, remember!) and avoid slang when something can be phrased differently without losing (too much) of the meaning.
Like myrtti said, there are already many language-specific forums and I think that those are good ways to provide support. It is not very doable to have multiple languages in one forum.
Great post, however do note we have #ubuntu-locoteams which we have seen more and more non English speaking team members enter in and we're all understanding of the language barrier and mindful of that when people explain themselves.
We have many ubuntu members who do not post on planet.ubuntu.com as they feel it has to be in English which is unfortunate as I'd love to read them – we all can use a web translator.
More and more countries have their own forums in their own languages and are very active there, I would also argue that the people on councils and boards and even ircs ops who put them selves forward want to be on those positions, those who don't do not.
We are a massive international community, a lot speak English, not everyone does. We do need to remember this on mailing lists, forums and irc you're right, not everyone is tolerant or patient at times but we do try.
Great post. Knowledge of English is now essential of course, not just for open source and software development in general but for all kind of jobs. In many companies, you can only hope to join if you speak English, even in non English speaking countries. Candidates fluent in English but non native speakers may be able to join companies of course, but the progression ladder in the company is likely to be more limited than for native English speakers. Information in your post seems to indicate this. In short, non native English speakers are often second class citizens in obvious or sometimes subtle ways.
I'm one of those who think that an easy, yet flexible and expressive auxiliary language such as esperanto would be not only more fair, but also a lot easier for most people. Of course, it won't happen any time soon, unless we all learn such an auxiliary language at school in all countries.
There are indeed a lot of jobs, especially in IT that require English. Some require a lot of English. It is said that the EU is more prone to hire British because of their English proficiency and their accent, so it can happen indeed that being a non-native speaker is a disadvantage. However, in most companies I don't think that the language barrier is higher than it is in open source communities. Some companies, when run by non-native speakers, probably suffer from the same problems as well.
Esperanto is a wonderful ideal and I do think that such a language could help, but that hasn't been put to the test yet and I think it will never be. It is not a trendy language, not a popular one and since it is not a language of a country that can rise to power (English only became the world language after the rise of the United States) I don't think it has much chance to become something people will want to learn. But maybe I'll be proven wrong, who knows?
Dude, I am from Chicago, so I am not privileged at all, as a matter of fact my English is even worse. And one more thing, I stepped down from the Community Council and the Developer Membership Boards, so there goes 2 spots with US/English
Rich 'nixternal' Johnson
This post reminds me of an old launchpad bug report.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad-foundations/...
I think this bug is very pertinent to your post. Can you take the time to comment on this bug?
Thank you for raising that bug again. I'll subscribe to it and will see if a comment from me would help.
If everyone here would mark the bug as affecting them!
The CC used to have two other non-US people on it: myself (Corey Burger) – (Canada) and Jerome Gotangco (Phillippines). But I think you point is well taken about the need to realize that there are lots of non-English speaking people in the community.
Not too make it sound too simple but: With privilege comes responsibility, and patience is key to understanding
What changes when the native English speakers realise that their proficiency at English gives them advantage?
I suppose the hope is that :
1) We become more tolerant of bad grammer.
2) We ask questions where there is confusion rather than dismiss the confusion
3) We cope better with misunderstandings (that could lead to who knows what: embarrassment; extra work; …)
Of course, this relies upon native english speakers being able to determine from the text alone whether or not an author of some post is actually meaning to say what they say.
I live in Sheffield in South Yorkshire in England. When I moved here I was surprised to hear the word 'while' where I would have expected the word 'until', or maybe just 'til', or even 'to'.
Question: "What hours do you work?"
Answer I would expect: "9 to 5"
Answer I would expect in Sheffield: "9 while 5"
It has a certain programmers logic to it though. But my point is this. Confusion is inherent in the language. Native speakers say confusing things as well as non native speakers, perhaps there is a belief amongst non-native speakers to think that native speakers must always be correct in their usage of the language, but that's often not true. (Especially with what I write!)
So I think it's pretty hard to turn this realisation of advantage into practical advice. Any suggestions?
You can't assume people don't mean what they say and start questioning everything, where would that leave you?
Matt Zimmerman is from the US. Baltimore, Maryland, if I recall correctly.
I haven’t seen anyone get flamed on any of the Ubuntu mailing lists I’m on for their English. Often they apologise about their “bad English” (which tends to turn out to be quite good!) beforehand and get replies back saying not to apologise and complimenting their skills at learning another language. I think I most often see this in Ubuntu Women. That’s more likely the rate of new people being greater there than, say, on ubuntu-devel.
Hmm you might also notice that I use British English spellings (see above: "apologise"), even though I'm American. I think English (UK) is more widely understood internationally, so I try to use it.
I wonder what the thoughts are on non-native speakers doing translations. I did a few Japanese translations years ago when I was still studying it (I'm too out of practice now to be useful), but I wonder how well-received it is when a non-native person submits translations.
The Oxford English Dictionary is using the American '-ize' I think, so it's not as clear as they try to teach at (our) school.
Not sure though if British really is the most often used version of English. It is the one the EU uses, but that's mostly because the US isn't a member state and officially all languages of the EU member states should be equal. Europeans often use the British spelling, but a lot of people also want to use the American instead. But I don't think that 'dialogue colourised doughnut programme' is a lot easier to understand 'dialog colorized donut program', it is just different.
It probably depends on the size of the translators pool how people will react to your contributions. In general I think you could say that people would welcome any contribution. However, contributions would probably be better received by communities with little translators, like Frisian, Esperanto or Klingon, than in communities like the Spanish, which has translated nearly everything there is to translate and has probably a lot more policies, customs and habits.
One aspect that you don't mention is reporting bugs. I've been in situations a couple of times where I've tried to translate and help reporters who reported bugs in a language other than English to be told that the bug should be in English and wouldn't be looked at if it wasn't.
I understand that the developers who will eventually work on the bugs use English and that it may take a lot of effort to translate problems from a foreign language to English but the risk in ignoring non-English bug reports is that important issues never get resolved and non-English users feel like second class citizens because they can't report their problems to someone who can do something about them. Any suggestion on how to resolve this would be welcome.
There have been talks in the Bug Squad about using Answers as a primary entry point for bug reports for a while now. This would solve two things:
1) Most bug reports are not valid defect reports, but in fact support requests. Using Answers can help to write better bug reports. Also, when a bug is a duplicate of another bug it doesn't have to mean that the support the reporter needs is the same as the support the reporter of the other bug needs. Answer can be linked to a bug report, and a question can be kept after a bug has been marked as a duplicate to make sure the user gets the support (s)he needs. Another plus is that by encouraging the use of Answers for support requests it would be very easy to attach a bug report to a support request if a bug would be discovered during the process of providing support and when it turns out that a bug reported via Answers was not a bug report the support can continue uninterrupted.
2) Answers has already got support for multiple languages — it only needs to be localised itself — which means that LoCos can use it to provide support in the native language of people.
Answers would have to be optimised for the use mentioned above before we could fully profit from the opportunities it provides us with, but it would:
1) Make bug reporting a more pleasant and helping experience for everyone.
2) Reduce the number of bugs we have to deal with as triagers.
Downsides would be: the work needed to make Answers suitable for this, but most importantly: getting people to provide the support and triage the questions in Answers. Many people would probably rather use other support methods, like the forum, a mailing list or IRC and we should be careful to prevent users having to go through the whole riddle again when they're referred to Answers by someone in that medium.
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One problem as a native English speaker is that there's no easy way for me to help non-native speakers. Replying to someone's message with a message saying "Your English needs some work. Here's how I would fix it up" comes across, at best, as incredibly condescending.
If some system, mailing list, or wiki could be set up for a purpose such as this, I think it would help this situation. I know I'd gladly spend an hour or two a day helping out.