Hacker News Reader

Comment by credo | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps you should also look at the number of people who speak Haitian Creole and the number of people who speak Latin.

Then, you may also want to look at the number of people who speak Haitian Creole as their primary (or only) language and compare that with the numbers for Latin.

That may give you a better appreciation for the reasoning behind Google-Translate's prioritization (though I should add that I'd also be surprised if they didn't include Latin)

View on HN

Exactly. There are more than a million natives of Haiti living outside their country, many presumably with potentially decent internet access.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_diaspora

And even people who don't have internet access at home can go to an internet shop, translate and print a bunch of documents, and take them home to read offline. So Google is potentially benefitting millions of people by providing this service.

I can see the recent disaster in Haiti playing a key part in Haitian Creole taking priority over Latin.

You should look at how many people who speak Haitian Creole have access to computers and the internet and compare that with people who speak Latin and have access to the net.

You'd be surprised at how prevalent Internet usage is in places like Haiti...

You'd also be surprised at how difficult it is to get wifi in ancient Rome.

The number of historical texts people are putting online in both languages should count for something as well. After all, I'm more likely to use Google Translate if I can't find a native speaker to translate it with localization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com