Re: Language data

[Guillaume Lelarge <guillaume(at)lelarge(dot)info>]

Magnus Hagander a ecrit le 18/02/2007 12:28:
> Now that we have an initial set of data (sure, it's less than a week,
> but it's something), here is some statistics on language settings in our
> visitors browsers (I've added all the different Spanish into one group etc):
>
> English			57.1%
> German			 5.8%
> Spanish			 5.3%
> Brazilian-Portuguese	 5.2%
> Japanese		 4.2%
> French			 3.9%
> Polish			 3.0%
>
> nobody else breaks over 3%, but there are a total of 107 different
> language combinations present.
>
> From this, I read that it's correct to say that English only represents
> a little over half our browsers primary language. But it's also true
> that adding translations will not buy us much more *per translation*.
> But if we do get both German and French (per discussions in the past
> week), that would buy us almost 10%.

I see a different way to look at your statistics. This is just 
percentage numbers. Do you have "real" numbers ? I mean, 3.9% of the 
people visiting www.postgresql.org speak french. OK. But 3.9% of how many ?

Looking at wikipedia, the United States' population stood at an 
estimated 300,000,000. France has an estimated population of 64 million 
people. So France has 21.33% of the population the United States has. So 
having a 3.9% french people visiting the www.postgresql.org web site 
seems a bit huge to me. Of course, there's other countries where french 
is an official language 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_French_is_an_official_language 
... hmmm, much more than I thought :) ).

And how many french people are interested in PostgreSQL ? I can't say 
but if more than 50% of the french people interested in PostgreSQL are 
visiting www.postgresql.org, we absolutely need a french translation on 
this website.

I just hope my explanations were understandable.

> Now, looking at geographical distribution, it's quite different:
> United States		21.5%
> Germany			 7.0%
> Brazil			 6.5%
> Japan			 4.6%
> Poland			 4.1%
> France			 4.0%
> United Kingdom		 4.0%
>
> Adding up English speaking countries in the top list (US, UK, Canada and
> Australia), we have about 30%. Which clearly shows that a lot of people
> outside English speaking countries have their browsers set for English
> as their primary choice - just like me ;-)

Or they are just using default options. That's what they have when they 
download an english Firefox or a beta release.

> [...]
> Regardless of this, given that two people have expressed interest in
> translating what's there now, I'll make sure that the translation
> continues to work as good or bad as it previously had. Then we can
> improve on that in the future, once we see actual needs from actual
> translators.

So we can start working on it ? that would be pretty cool :)

Regards.


--
Guillaume.