On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 06:01:59AM -0500, [email protected] wrote:
My gut splits the difference on this issue; I suggest an approach to
meet in the middle – a version of the docs written in simplified
English (Not quite Up Goer Five simplified, but simplified.)
As an English speaker, my gut tells me that it would be much harder to
write *accurate* simplified English technical documentation than to
translate it into another language.
You have all the difficulties of translation, plus you're working under
a handicap of only using some (ill-defined?) subset of English.
Wikipedia offers some evidence supporting my view:
- the main English Wikipedia has 5 million articles, written by nearly
140K active users;
- the Swedish Wikipedia is almost as big, 3M articles from only 3K
active users;
- but the Simple English Wikipedia has just 123K articles and 871
active users. That's fewer articles than Esperanto!
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
Nevertheless, I certainly wouldn't object if people wanted to try
writing Simple English translations of the docs. But I don't think they
would be as useful as translations into non-English.