Re: Language data

>> From this, I read that it's correct to say that English only represents
>> a little over half our browsers primary language. But it's also true
>> that adding translations will not buy us much more *per translation*.
>> But if we do get both German and French (per discussions in the past
>> week), that would buy us almost 10%.
>>
>
> I see a different way to look at your statistics. This is just
> percentage numbers. Do you have "real" numbers ? I mean, 3.9% of the
> people visiting www.postgresql.org speak french. OK. But 3.9% of how many ?
>
> Looking at wikipedia, the United States' population stood at an
> estimated 300,000,000. France has an estimated population of 64 million
> people. So France has 21.33% of the population the United States has. So
> having a 3.9% french people visiting the www.postgresql.org web site
> seems a bit huge to me. Of course, there's other countries where french
> is an official language
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_French_is_an_official_language
> ... hmmm, much more than I thought :) ).
>
> And how many french people are interested in PostgreSQL ? I can't say
> but if more than 50% of the french people interested in PostgreSQL are
> visiting www.postgresql.org, we absolutely need a french translation on
> this website.
>
> I just hope my explanations were understandable.

Sure, that's definitly an interesting discussion. If you're interested
in doing some "real analysis" along that line, I'll be happy to give you
access to view the statistics reports for www.postgresql.org, as long as
you promise to report your findings to the list :)

>> Now, looking at geographical distribution, it's quite different:
>> United States 21.5%
>> Germany 7.0%
>> Brazil 6.5%
>> Japan 4.6%
>> Poland 4.1%
>> France 4.0%
>> United Kingdom 4.0%
>>
>> Adding up English speaking countries in the top list (US, UK, Canada and
>> Australia), we have about 30%. Which clearly shows that a lot of people
>> outside English speaking countries have their browsers set for English
>> as their primary choice - just like me ;-)
>>
>
> Or they are just using default options. That's what they have when they
> download an english Firefox or a beta release.

Sure, but that works the other way around in IE. For example, even if I
install *English* IE versions, it will select Swedish language by
default simply because I said I wanted Swedish date/time style. While we
have some more firefox users than IE, I think it pretty much evens out
in the end, really.

>> [...]
>> Regardless of this, given that two people have expressed interest in
>> translating what's there now, I'll make sure that the translation
>> continues to work as good or bad as it previously had. Then we can
>> improve on that in the future, once we see actual needs from actual
>> translators.
>>
>
> So we can start working on it ? that would be pretty cool :)

Yes, but please only start working on the *templates* part. The .po
files will likely be noticeably different once I commit my changes
(almost there, but a few details to go), so there's not much point in
starting with that yet.

//Magnus