Jonas Eckerman wrote:
John Rudd wrote:
If they're not multi-lingual, and only speak english, then there
wasn't any point in the non-english speaker trying to contact them,
was there? :-)
The fact that the mail system and it's supporting sites aren't
multilingual does not mean that the mail users aren't. A typical
national ISP for example might well have many users that are fluent in a
number of languages that the ISP's pages are not available in.
My use of "they" was more inclusive than you're reading. I wasn't
referring to just the ISP/mailadmin. I was also referring to the
original recipient.
But there's no necessity, in what's been described so far, that the
web page the URL leads to would be english only.
Of course there isn't. There is a very real possibility though.
For a mail service provider it could mean quite a lot of work to first
find out what languages all of their users might receive (and be able to
understand) mail in, and then to make sure that they instructions
available in all those languages.
They already have to bear that burden in providing documentation, don't
they? They either pick a one or a few standard languages to support, or
they try to come up with a huge base of documentation in every language
they can conceive. If they choose the former, then some percentage of
users (their own, and remote people trying to figure out things) will be
out in the cold if they don't speak one of the supported languages.
This isn't a problem specific to the technology being discussed.
