I received the following e-mail today:
gençlerin türkçe bilgiye ihtiyacı var. türkçe yazsanıza!
Translation: Young people need Turkish articles. Why don’t you write in Turkish!
Let’s ask this as a question, or a more relevant question of why I am writing my blog in English, at the end of this post.
People Who Just Can’t Admit They’re Wrong
I am always shopping for new blogs for my RSS reader. Especially blogs written in Turkish. Not only because of Turkish is my mother tongue. But mainly because there are so few, you have to keep searching all the time. So far I’ve followed many blogs only to find out they’re by far and large not for me. Except for FZ Blogs of course, FZ rocks.
Then I’ve found this other blog, with FZ’s suggestion. It is in Turkish, check! tech/internet/programming related, check! Then I subscribed it happily. An article published today led to that e-mail in the beginning. It looked like an innocent article about Google Ventures until the final part.
Bir takım ahmakların dayattıkları genel fikir, halihazırda yurtdışında mevcut bir sistemi ne kadar çabuk kopyalayarak bir “.com” şirketi açarsanız o kadar başarılı olabileceğiniz yönünde. Bu senaryoda ileri teknoloji kullanımı, yaratıcılık, tasarım, özgünlük gibi unsurlar geri plana atılmış durumda.
Translation: Some fools are spreading the idea that the quicker you can duplicate an existing dotcom business the more successful you become. Advanced technologies, creativity, design and originality are neglected in this scenario.
Belli başlı, az sayıda ve sistemin çarpıklığından palazlanmış büyük oyuncu, etraflarına bazı çığırtkan ve spekülatif insanları toplayarak, kendi aralarında bir birlik oluşturmuşlar ve kendi aralarındaki rekabete rağmen, dışardan oyuna katılmak isteyenlere karşı düşmanca ve dışlayıcı bir tavır içindeler. Aslında bu primitif bir oyun, sektör var, oyuncular ve oyuncu olmayanlar var, oyuncular oyuna yeni oyuncu girmesini engellemek için işbirliği yaparken kendi aralarında da rekabet ediyorlar. Durum kabaca bundan ibaret.
Translation: Some big players, who had grown rich out of deformities of the system, gathering speculators and barkers around, formed an alliance, despite competition amongst themselves, to cast newcomers out. This is actually a simple game, there is the industry, players and non players, players are competing with each other while they cooperate to obstruct new players. This is roughly the situation
Naturally I asked if they could back that claim up. Are big players really trying to crush new startups? How exactly are they doing that?
I got no response to that comment, no big surprise. Instead I received the e-mail I mentioned in the beginning. Why? Because we love throwing mud at successful and not-so-successful1. Of course there’s no such secret allience between big players of Internet industry in Türkiye. At the very most they are (naturaly) protecting their investment. This is neither illegal nor immoral. If you actually have anything to support you claim Mr Consultant I’d be happy to read. Otherwise you should just admit you were wrong and fix that post.
Guilty Conscience
Just trying to move the conversation into private, shows that you have nothing meaningful to say about the evil secret cult of Internet companies. That’s not even an e-mail you have sent me. It is more like an IM message pasted in an e-mail composer.
gençlerin türkçe bilgiye ihtiyacı var. türkçe yazsanıza!
Why don’t we pay the minimum attention to aviod being a situation where we end up being wrong. And more importantly why do we still insist even after we realize we are wrong. Say, if you give crack/warez links in your blog and then claim the software/media in question is public domain. And then when presentented with link to its official site where it is being sold (ie. not abandonware) you are supposed to try to make fun of people who did the warning? This is why I don’t, I can’t follow any Turkish bloggers.
Justification of stealing is bad for the person and bad for the community. Same is true with needless feces throwing and flaming corporate hatred.
Mr Consultant, I liked your blog. I want to follow it, I want to refer it to my friends, I want to learn something from it. So, please put some effort in when writing. I also like your web application yazboz.com a lot. It may be another duplicate of a well known class of applications you were bashing in your post2. But I like it. And I hope it becomes a big success.
Why Am I Torturing You With My Broken English?
The young needs Turkish information sources, eh? No! The young need to drag his sorry ass and learn English first. And then he should go read something of substance. And then if he has some time to kill he can read my blog. I am not an expert or guru or anything like that. I don’t have a mission or inclination to educate the young.
Trying to translate all the knowledge (written in English) on the Internet is absurdly, disproportionally more work than individually learning English, that it is plain stupid to even think about suggesting it.
I am writing in English for the following reasons:
- It is a nice filter. If you are too lazy to learn enough English, I have nothing to say to you3.
- Internet language is English4, insist on ignoring this fact and you will stay under-developed. On the contrary the more nationalistic you behave the more marginalized you get. If you are truly for technological advancement you can do nothing but to be pragmatic. Also I love and respect my languge. That is why I don’t butcher it trying to write technical stuff half English half Turkish.
- In support of the first point; writing in English allows me to connect to a larger and better equipped community. So yes, instead of script kiddes who’ll never get past LAMP, I prefer a pythonista visiting my blog to at least get an idea of what kind of person I am.
If, for some odd reason, a young person were to listen to my advice, I’d like to repeat; learn decent English. Especially if you are a programmer. Get a book, a real book not one of those educational materials, and read it. It’s simple as that. Or all you’ll will be have to read is Mr. Consultant’s blog.
EDIT:
Author of mentioned post removed the second quote, about Internet investors, along with my comment there.
1: …and we love pissing contests. Just reply a question with another question, try to find the weak spot. look, I can piss further!
2: See the first quote.
3: This is of course in context of this Blog; mainly programming and programmers.
Related posts:
so you want to see examples. wait. obviously some wrong has been done. we are building a paper trail, and you might see this, in the form of a lawsuit. yes, I have done some bashing in my article, but notice I have not pointed my finger at anyone.
Also, the views expressed were not only my views, but as well as others.
about, your views in writing in english or not, I disagree. as a person who can understand technical english, I believe it is our duty to introduce or transmit information from english to turkish. it is also a big problem when you attempt to write a turkish text about computers, and can not find equivalent words for certain computer terms. My Turkish blog has attracted interest not only by programmers, but also by designers, artists, etc. Dont you think those non-techies should not be inspired by a nice data visualization?
And about other class of applications you mentioned: could you name which one uses a graph backed database, lucene, hadoop, and fuzzy filtering? We built yazboz as a technology playground for playing with the above technologies.
And the general slant in your response: dont you think you are little over-aggressive? Your calling me
Mr. Consultantand the advice to otherslearn decent englishor you will beMr. Consultant‘s blog is an example of ad hominem attack, one of the seven logical fallacies. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem) – I think it is you who should fix his post buddy.I did make a mistake there, it’s not
be Mr. Consultant's blog, fixed now. It was actually meant to be a complement.How do know for sure those other duplicating applications don’t use exotic technologies in the backend?
I agree 100% about the difficulties writing in Turkish. It is nice of you to take up the challenge. I just tried to explain my standpoint.
On the matter of your accusation; it is practically not different at all from finger pointing. Because there are so few
big players, once you go plural it is inevitably finger pointing.“Internet language is English” is like saying “Internet has a race”.
Internet is supposed to connect “everyone”. But just me, you or English people. Internet is supposed to contain “everything”.
In the future, when everyone builds intelligent systems from existing data on the web, we will have a hard time accessing sufficient data to develop such systems because of your approach.
“In support of the first point; writing in English allows me to connect to a larger and better equipped community. So yes, instead of script kiddes who’ll never get past LAMP, I prefer a pythonista visiting my blog to at least get an idea of what kind of person I am.”
This assumption is purely wrong. First, the fraction of script kiddies speaking English is larger. Second, if you don’t show the way in Turkish, how can you expect those script kiddies to learn better? But oh, you just classified them as people “who’ll never get past LAMP” right? The reason they may not get past LAMP is that new articles are not translated frequently enough. LAMP was cool years ago and Turkish youth had to stay there for years because of insufficient materials. They’ll catch up when we throw good material to them.
No, Yazboz is not another duplicate of word association games. Yazboz has an original user interface and the feature set is much richer than the mentioned sites. Also, none of these sites share data with the community. We have built Yazboz not for gaining commercial success, but with the best of intentions for serving researchers.
We have used technologies such as hadoop, lucene and lingpipe, tagged as “exotic” probably out of ignorance. The underlying frameworks based on these technologies has given us scalability and flexibility. We are benefiting from these well-tested frameworks in the development of our next project.
Mud throwing at someone’s work just because you don’t like the response you get to an unrelated query: Not very mature, eh?
Ozgur Oktay – Yazboz co-author
@Özgür: Yes, I am oversensitive and childlike sometimes… Oh, but the ignorance is permanent.
OTOH seeing you guys being so cool-headed and grown up about this is very inspiring. You obviously know what you’re doing.
As a mechanical engineer I use computers heavily, yet, I am not a coder. My job also requires technical English of a different kind. While there is not much written in English about my topics, I never fall into the illusion of people writing in Turkish either. There is not a platoon of people “choosing” to write in Turkish for a greater good. As far as I can scan, the same goes for coding.
I also like to meet with travelers from abroad. And when I am with them I force myself to talk with other Turkish friends in English. Because that’s polite and welcoming. As far as the analogy goes I believe the same goes for the web.
Any people contributing to the human knowledge can share it anyway they like. Also there is the technical traditions: medical science runs in Latin, Musical terms run in Italian, Turkish law run in Ottoman. If you are willing to act against the hegemony of English language please do it in a wider and political sense. Because the Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony can not be reversed by writing in Turkish, it requires a much wider field of resistance to have any effect.
In my opinion, culture and politics are entangled with each other.
When you don’t convey up-to-date information using a language, that language becomes inefficient and eventually useless.
Language also affects the way we think, so when we don’t use our language, we’re indeed changing our original style of thinking, we’re changing our culture.
Additionally, there’s a difference between using a technical jargon and teaching. Italian or Latin words may serve as good shortcuts, but for a newcomer things will be different.
Teaching materials should serve as a bridge that should be crossed before using technical jargon. To use the jargon, first you learn the jargon. You do not start explaining things by “allegro”, you first state that it’s 120-168 bpm.
I respect your language preference but I don’t believe it’s always a good decision. There may be occasions where it would be better to use English or another language, but I believe this case (I mean my criticism about this blog) is not one of them.