(humor/humour) Shouldn't the title of this forum be "Internationalisation"?

[andrew8]

Are you sure the title of this forum shouldn't be "Internationalisation"?

((-:

Perhaps this humor/humour does raise a serious issue . . . that of including and/or accepting-
- different kinds of spelling for the same word and
- using different words to explain the same thing.

Will/Do Editors permit non-U.S. spellings and words?

Should such variation be permitted?

I have my opinion but am not suggesting any solution.

[Greg Woodhouse]

Are you sure the title of this forum shouldn't be "Internationalisation"?

Why not?

[Aleta Curry]

Are you sure the title of this forum shouldn't be "Internationalisation"?

Probably

Take a look at the "Variants in English...." thread.

[Robert_W_King]

Here's the fix:

1. Establish a bank of words that change spelling based on the locality of the user.
2. Do a traceroute to determine the locality of the user.
3. Set the appropriate flag and load up the appropriate wordset.
4. Word is correcly displayed on user side.
5. Profit!

[Aleta Curry]

There's no 'quick fix', Robert.

1.  Your solution doesn't take into account grammar, or usage.

2.  It doesn't take into account words that mean different things.

3.  So here I am in Australia and I write an article about San Francisco.  I can hardly use Commonwealth English and metric measures.

That's just for starters! 

[Robert_W_King]

Ah, it's only meant to provide a solution for one problem--the spelling of or/our words.

[Derek Harkness]

Automatically filtering words is a more complex task that you think. For example, the back of a car in America is 'Trunk' but in the UK it is 'Boot'. Both trunk and boot can also mean things other than the back of a car. How can the computer know when to change the word and when not to change the word.

There are relatively few words that have alternative spellings. It hardly seems worth arguing over color and colour. 

Also, spelling of words is relatively minor complair to some other differences between English versions. For example, the meaning of the word 'momentarily' varies between the UK and the US but the spelling is consistent.

As for -ize v -ise endings, it's not as simple as in the US do this and in the UK do that. There is a tendency in each country to prefer one over the other but it's only a tendency. There are large and significant minorities in both countries that go against the other way. Neither spelling is actually wrong and both are very common.

[Greg Woodhouse]

For example, the meaning of the word 'momentarily' varies between the UK and the US but the spelling is consistent.

Funny, I thought it varied between speakers of US English that know what the word means and those that don't. Oh, and then there's "presently".

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

A couple of points:
(1) -ize endings are Oxford English as well as American, and can therefore be accepted by everyone.
(2) minor variants [e.g. color/colour; labor/labour] can be dealt with individually, in my opinion.
(3) some more serious variants can cause confusion, e.g. the spelling, meaning and use of caret in US and UK English. These have to be dealt with carefully in each article. See my attempt at doing this in the article Carrot [the section on homonyms]

[Aleta Curry]

I don't have a problem with this, Martin, BUT it has to be generally agreed on. 

It will be a complete waste of time for an author to write [[colour]] with a redirect from [[color]], only to have someone else come along and move colour->color.  So now the redirect has changed, and all the internal links to one or the other have to be changed or you'll have double redirects.

Not a big deal with colour...trying to think of one that would be messier...how about swede and turnip?  I'm sure there are others that are worse--could have redirects to something that makes no sense at all.

[Greg Woodhouse]

I don't have a problem with this, Martin, BUT it has to be generally agreed on. 

It will be a complete waste of time for an author to write [[colour]] with a redirect from [[color]], only to have someone else come along and move colour->color.  So now the redirect has changed, and all the internal links to one or the other have to be changed or you'll have double redirects.

Not a big deal with colour...trying to think of one that would be messier...how about swede and turnip?  I'm sure there are others that are worse--could have redirects to something that makes no sense at all.

I suppose the reason this whole discussion seems so absurd to me is that it is quite common to see papers (even in edited collections) written in versions of English other than the American one. (How's that for an exercise in circumlocution?) Certainly, differences in pronunciation are as significant as differences in orthography, but I don't see CNN restricting itself to speakers of American English (except, of course, on its international feeds). There is even a cable network, BBC America, which is quite popular here in the States, and even before that, people would often watch the BBC news on PBS. Narrators of documentary series (something that can vary from episode to epsisode, I might add) are often speakers of British English, or Australian, or.... I don't believe I've seen any special notices in the program listings.

In short, I don't think the puerile behavior of the occasional author who can't resist moving "colour" to "color" is any justification for developing an elaborate (and inconvenient) system of language tagging. Asking for a bit more maturity on the part of authors seems a much more practical approach.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

I agree 100%, Greg. See also my post on the other thread [why do we have 2 threads on the same topic?!]

[Aleta Curry]

I agree 100%, Greg. See also my post on the other thread [why do we have 2 threads on the same topic?!]

I agree, too.  Now, if someone will just say that that is now policy, we can run with it.

We don't need two threads.  It'll stop if a mod locks this one.

[Derek Harkness]

The two threads should be merged, not locked. I think there's a third one somewhere too.