Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [PATCH] CodingStyle: Inclusive Terminology

Daniel Palmer
2020-07-06T13:55:40Z

Hi Willy,

On Sun, 5 Jul 2020 at 13:55, Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> wrote:

> I'm personally thinking that for a non-native speaker it's already
> difficult to find the best term to describe something,

I'm a nobody in the kernel world but this point made me think.

I'm a native English speaker but I don't live in an English speaking
place and my experience is that a lot of technology terms have been
directly imported from English into the local language almost as-is.

In my case master/slave have been directly transliterated into
Japanese as masuta and sureebu and exists like that in technical
documentation for example:
https://www.analog.com/jp/analog-dialogue/articles/introduction-to-spi-interface.html#

I can imagine that by changing terminology that has been in use for so
long that it's been imported into other languages directly or is
common enough that non-native speakers know what it means might have
exactly the opposite result by excluding people that aren't native
English speakers and can't decode synonyms that are obvious to a
native speaker.

Cheers,

Daniel