nanog mailing list archives
Re: black hat .cn networks
From: Jim Dixon <jdd () vbc net>
Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 08:12:29 +0100 (BST)
On Tue, 8 May 2001, Shawn McMahon wrote:
If we are going to be politically correct and insist that every NOC in the world be capable of communicating in all of the major languages of the world, the Internet will grind to a halt.And if we are going to insist that they all speak English, we are going to be insisting to deaf ears; case in point, all the complaints here about abuse complaints being blackholed.
The very practical hard reality is that those running the Internet communicate in English. The reason for this is very simple: cost. In Europe, adding simultaneous translation into the major EU languages can easily double the cost of holding a conference. This sort of compromise is universal. There are many languages within China, for example, but people compromise by using one of them for universal communications, the language commonly called Mandarin. Nobody is insisting that the world's NOCs communicate in English. They just do, because it's practical. In most countries, there is a very high probability that anyone with a technical education has had several years of English in school. This is certainly the case in Japan, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, most of Southeast Asia, and the countries of northern Europe. It may be that in ten years or so machine translation will be accurate enough and cheap enough to allow the sort of thing that you propose. However, I suspect that most people will use this high quality machine translation to improve the quality of their translations to and from English. Once again, it's simple economics: if there are N languages, the cost of writing translators to and from English is going to be proportional to N, but the cost of writing a full set of translators between all N languages is going to be proportional to N squared, a huge number. Attempting to build a universal tool for translating problem reports into all the languages of the world is a utopian project that is not going to succeed. A more realistic goal would be trying to get English-speaking engineers to write problem reports in good, clear English. I don't think that that is going to happen, and it's far easier to achieve than what you are proposing. -- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015
Current thread:
- Re: black hat .cn networks, (continued)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Shawn McMahon (May 08)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Justin Hinderliter (May 08)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Justin Hinderliter (May 07)
- RE: black hat .cn networks Paul Lantinga (May 07)
- RE: black hat .cn networks Dan Hollis (May 07)
- RE: black hat .cn networks Sabri Berisha (May 08)
- RE: black hat .cn networks Randy Bush (May 08)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Shawn McMahon (May 08)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Jim Dixon (May 08)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Shawn McMahon (May 08)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Jim Dixon (May 09)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Adrian Chadd (May 09)
- Message not available
- Re: black hat .cn networks Adrian Chadd (May 09)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Randy Bush (May 09)
- Re: black hat .cn networks dklindt (May 09)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Scott Francis (May 09)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Shawn McMahon (May 09)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Jim Dixon (May 09)
- Re: black hat .cn networks Steve Sobol (May 09)
- Common language? [was re: black hat .cn networks] Clayton Fiske (May 09)
- RE: Common language? [was re: black hat .cn networks] Deepak Jain (May 09)
- RE: black hat .cn networks Dan Hollis (May 07)