<story><title>How I Judge the Quality of Documentation</title><url>http://ericholscher.com/blog/2014/feb/27/how-i-judge-documentation-quality/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>btbuildem</author><text>Next time you come across a project documented solely in Lithuanian &amp;#x2F; Japanese &amp;#x2F; Swahili, I hope you will refer to &lt;a href=&quot;http://ericholscher.com/blog/2014/feb/27/how-i-judge-documentation-quality/#language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ericholscher.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;feb&amp;#x2F;27&amp;#x2F;how-i-judge-documen...&lt;/a&gt; for insight.&lt;p&gt;English is the de-facto language of the Internet (let&amp;#x27;s not discuss here how damaging that is to English as a language in general). I strongly believe that public-facing software projects should be documented in English first and foremost, with translations to other languages added as resources allow.&lt;p&gt;I work for a small company in Quebec (that&amp;#x27;s the Canadian province that has a Language Police) - despite most of the team being Francophone, all our internal documentation and code docs are in English. Why would that be? Because everyone realizes, without ever really having discussed it, that it is the only efficient way to do it, if we want to collaborate with others, if we want to grow, if we want others to contribute, having everything in French would be creating unnecessary hurdles.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thoward37</author><text>I have to say that I completely disagree with this perspective. Yes, currently our &amp;#x27;lingua franca&amp;#x27; of business and technology is English, but I feel that is a problem, not a solution.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a problem because it unfairly advantages native English speaking people in business. It creates a barrier of entry to people who did not learn English from an early age, along with their native language. It makes it much harder for those people to be part of business, technology, and open source. It degrades the quality of communication and work-output by forcing non-native speakers to express themselves in English.&lt;p&gt;Does being a good engineer imply being good at spoken natural languages? I have met some brilliant engineers in China who are barely functional in English. If you were to interact with them purely in English, you would think you&amp;#x27;re talking to a 5 year old, based on the language alone. Some of the engineers I&amp;#x27;ve met in China aren&amp;#x27;t even that capable with English, but are wonderful developers writing interesting things.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes they created documentation in Chinese, sometimes in English. Guess which one they were able to express their ideas in more clearly? Chinese.&lt;p&gt;When you write, you should write in your native language, and express your idea to the best of your ability. Then, if you want to translate that to other languages later, to make it more accessible to others, do that as a separate task. Maybe hire a professional technical translator to do that work.&lt;p&gt;You gave this example of coming across a page written in Lithuanian or Japanese, presuming of course that you&amp;#x27;re not a native speaker of those languages. Fine, that&amp;#x27;s exactly how every Chinese native speaker feels when they come across a page of English text, every day of their life as a developer... but they figure it out, even with terrible language skills. You know  why? Not because &amp;quot;English is the language of business&amp;quot; but because they just want to learn about the content, and aren&amp;#x27;t going to try to force you to write it in Chinese so they can do that. If all those pages were in French they would figure that out too.&lt;p&gt;With the attitude you expressed above, the main people who benefit from this are native English speakers. Anyone else is still in the 2nd language boat. So then of that group, you advantage people with a talent for natural languages, or who are wealthy enough, as a child, to have access to education resources to learn another language. As a former English teacher in China, I promise you that this is a huge economic divide. The kids who can afford to learn English succeed, those who can&amp;#x27;t, don&amp;#x27;t. That&amp;#x27;s fucked up, and not at all a reasonable way to approach business. A good engineer should not be left with no opportunities because they grew up poor, or have no real talent learning foreign languages.&lt;p&gt;In business, such concerns about equality and fair access might not be very important, because unfair advantages and competition are what much of business is all about... but in open source, and in modern businesses that are learning from the open source model, I think being concerned with inclusiveness is paramount. So yes, you might have to struggle through reading something like this:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/be5invis/youki/blob/master/README.yk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;be5invis&amp;#x2F;youki&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;README.yk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;... but it doesn&amp;#x27;t take much to punch &amp;quot;Youki 是一个文档生成语言，其具备完整的编程特性和完备的宏特性，使之可作任意复杂的文章。Youki 是完全开放源码的，依照 MIT 协议发布。&amp;quot; into Google Translate (or use the auto-translate features of Chrome). Now we can all get on with our lives and use be5invis&amp;#x27;s cool documentation generation tool.&lt;p&gt;Would you prefer to exclude him and his work from our community by forcing him, a Chinese square-peg through some English speaking round-hole? Personally, I&amp;#x27;m willing to do a little extra work to understand him in his own language. I also appreciate deeply that he has to do that work constantly, in order to read my code&amp;#x2F;docs in my native language.</text></comment>
<story><title>How I Judge the Quality of Documentation</title><url>http://ericholscher.com/blog/2014/feb/27/how-i-judge-documentation-quality/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>btbuildem</author><text>Next time you come across a project documented solely in Lithuanian &amp;#x2F; Japanese &amp;#x2F; Swahili, I hope you will refer to &lt;a href=&quot;http://ericholscher.com/blog/2014/feb/27/how-i-judge-documentation-quality/#language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ericholscher.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;feb&amp;#x2F;27&amp;#x2F;how-i-judge-documen...&lt;/a&gt; for insight.&lt;p&gt;English is the de-facto language of the Internet (let&amp;#x27;s not discuss here how damaging that is to English as a language in general). I strongly believe that public-facing software projects should be documented in English first and foremost, with translations to other languages added as resources allow.&lt;p&gt;I work for a small company in Quebec (that&amp;#x27;s the Canadian province that has a Language Police) - despite most of the team being Francophone, all our internal documentation and code docs are in English. Why would that be? Because everyone realizes, without ever really having discussed it, that it is the only efficient way to do it, if we want to collaborate with others, if we want to grow, if we want others to contribute, having everything in French would be creating unnecessary hurdles.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>green7ea</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a consultant in Quebec and I&amp;#x27;ve seen too many companies document code in French. Sometimes variable and function names are in a mix of French and English. The worse is when your errors and exceptions are in French: you get very confused international clients. English reading and writing skills are a MUST for programmers and I envy your working in what sounds like a much nicer code base.</text></comment>