I worked with an office of Germans who insisted that ASCII was sufficient. The German language uses letters that cannot be represented in ASCII.
In fairness, they mostly wanted stuff to be in English, and when necessary, to transliterate German characters into their English counterparts (in German there is a standardised way of doing this), so I can understand why they didn't see it was necessary. I just never understood why I, as the non-German, was forever the one trying to convince them that Germans would probably prefer to use their software in German...
I’ve run into a similar-ish situation working with East-Asian students and East-Asian faculty. Me, an American who wants to be clear and make policies easy for everybody to understand: worried about name ordering a bit (Do we want to ask for their last name or their family name in this field, what’s the stupid learning management system want, etc etc). Chinese co-worker: we can just ask them for their last names, everybody knows what Americans mean when they ask for that, and all the students are used to dealing with this.
Hah, fair enough. I think it was an abstract question to me, so I was looking for the technically correct answer. Practical question for him, so he gave the practical answer.
You should have asked how they would encode the german currency sign (€ for euro) in ASCII or its german counterpart latin1/iso-8859-1...
It's not possible. However I bet they would argument to use iso-8859-15 (latin9 / latin0) with the international currency sign (¤) instead or insist that char 128 of latin1 is almost always meant as €, so just ignore the standard in these cases and use a new font.
This would only fail in older printers and who is still printing stuff these days? Nobody right?
Using real utf-8 is just too complex... All these emojis are nuts
Weirdly the old Deutsch Mark doesn't seem to have its own code point in the block start U+20A0, whereas the Spanish equivalent (Peseta, ₧, not just Pt) does.
It's not a Unicode issue, there just isn't a dedicated symbol for it, everyone just used the letters DM. Unicode (at least back then) was mostly a superset of existing character sets and then distinct glyphs.
That would be a fine answer, but for the fact that other currencies like the rupee (₨) that are "just letters" do have their own codepoint. Being made up of two symbols doesn't necessarily make something not a symbols, in semiotics or in Unicode.
In fact this is one of the root problems, there are plenty of Unicode symbols you can make out of others, either juxtaposing or overstriking or using a combining character, but this isn't consistently done.
There are some valid reasons to use software in English as a German speaker. Main among those is probably translations.
If you can speak English, you might be better of using the software in English, as having to deal with the English language can often be less of hassle, than having to deal with inconsistent, weird, or outright wrong translations.
Even high quality translations might run into issues, where the same thing is translated once as "A" and then as "B" in another context. Or run into issues where there is an English technical term being used, that has no prefect equivalent in German (i.e. a translation does exist, but is not a well-known, clearly defined technical term). More often than not though, translations are anything but high quality. Even in expensive products from big international companies.
This is definitely a problem that can occur, but for the one I was thinking of originally when writing the comment, we had pretty much all the resources available: the company sold internationally, so already had plenty of access to high-quality translators, and the application we were building was in-house, so we could go and ask the teams themselves if the translations made sense. More importantly, the need was also clearly there - many of the users of the application were seasonal workers, often older and less well-educated, in countries where neither English nor German were particularly relevant languages. Giving buttons labels in our users' languages meant they could figure out what they needed to do much more quickly, rather than having to memorise button colours and positions.
You're right that sometimes translation for technical terms is difficult, but the case I experienced far more often was Germans creating their own English words, or guessing at phrases they thought ought to exist because their English was not as good at they believed.
I agree that high quality translations are hard, and particularly difficult to retrofit into an existing application. But unless you have a very specialised audience, they're usually worth it!
Compiler errors or low level error messages in general are a good example. Translating them reduces the ability of someone who doesn't share your language to help you.
> I just never understood why I, as the non-German, was forever the one trying to convince them that Germans would probably prefer to use their software in German...
I've heard that German is often one of the first localizations of (desktop) software because there were often super-long words in the translations of various concepts, so if you wanted to test typeface rendering and menu breakage it was good language to run through your QA for that.
Or you use pseudo-localization, which does simple programmatic substitution to make all English strings longer by e.g. doubling letters or inserting random non-alphabetic characters, adding diacritics etc while still retaining readability to English speakers.
> I just never understood why I, as the non-German, was forever the one trying to convince them that Germans would probably prefer to use their software in German...
I cannot know, but they could be ideological. For example, they had found it wonderful to use plain ASCII, no need for special keyboard layouts or something like that, and they decided that German would be much better without its non-ASCII characters. They could believe something like this, and they wouldn't say it aloud in the discussion with you because it is irrelevant for the discussion: you weren't trying to change German.
I don't think localisation should be forced on anyone, but we had enough people using our software who couldn't speak English that getting it right would have made a lot of people's lives easier. At one place I worked, they even added Cantonese text to a help page to let Cantonese users know how to get support - but all the text on the buttons and links to get to that point was in English!
As developers, we need to build software for our users, and not for ourselves. That means proper localisation, and it means giving users the option of choosing their own language and settings.
In fairness, they mostly wanted stuff to be in English, and when necessary, to transliterate German characters into their English counterparts (in German there is a standardised way of doing this), so I can understand why they didn't see it was necessary. I just never understood why I, as the non-German, was forever the one trying to convince them that Germans would probably prefer to use their software in German...