pauloxnet – Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Multilingualism
TL ;DR Over the past week, the Italian Django community has translated an important part of Django’s documentation into Italian, allowing for online publication and considerably increasing linguistic diversity in the community.
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” — Nelson Mandela
I have been dealing with FLOSS (Free Libre and Open Source software) for more than 20 years and I must admit that the community has grown a lot and the issues dealt with within it have improved.
A very important issue that has become important lately is the diversity of people in the community at all levels. I am happy that these issues are particularly present in the Django community, the one in which I participate most actively. I also try to contribute to the increase of diversity, among other things by participating as a coach in the Django Girls workshops.
One type of diversity that is rarely talked about, in my opinion, is linguistic diversity. Unfortunately, in an area such as computer science where English has been the lingua franca from the very beginning, it is easy to forget that in reality most of the users and developers of FLOSS software are not native English speakers.
