[clug] Internode dumps FOSS for MS Exchange

[Karun Dambiec]

On 18/02/10 9:07 PM, Mike Carden wrote:
>> I think the issue is rather the other way, with speakers who only speak
>> English, and expect everyone else to do so at a conference in their country,
>> where Dutch is the native language.
>>
>>      
> I'm only half with you there.
>
> Anyone should respect a country's native language. Although the
> English language has a large share of the world's attention, I don't
> assume that everyone should use it.
> But... I found myself a tiny bit annoyed in The Netherlands to see a
> conference attended by people from a wide range of European nations
> (and me) in which the agreed language was not understood by as many
> people as English would have been. I'm monolingual and therefore the
> lowest common denominator. Most of my hosts were polylingual and
> therefore the HCD. I submit that a conference in The Hague delivered
> in English would have been understood by more people than if it had
> been delivered in Dutch.
>
> I had some great discussions in English with most of the presenters
> after their talks - mostly to find out what they'd talked about.
>
>    
Perhaps German would have been the best choice, seeing as it is the most 
common mother tounge in the European Union.
It is always difficult communicating in an environment, where multiple 
languages are spoken, and whom not everyone understands each one.

And if it is a workshop held in the netherlands, it is reasonable to 
expect it to be in Dutch.
The same if it was in the UK or Germany, you would expect it to be in 
English or German.

I think here it is not realised enough the difficulty, in countries like 
Australia, where English is the official language, and it is not common 
to speak multiple languages.

Given if it was in English, perhaps 49% of people may not have 
understood based on statistics of languages spoken. Hence one of the 
reasons why all European Union documents are always in multiple languages.

I dont think its possible to make the assumption more people would 
understand English than Dutch, without knowing more about the audience 
and doing a survey of them.