Accomodating ESL speakers

[Jari Arkko]

todd glassey wrote:

> To bring into that any other languages complicates the qualifying of
> standards tremendously since then the Editors MUST be fluent in those
> languages from a technical sense so that they can see for instance, how a
> French  or Hebrew update tracks the original English printing on RFCXXXX for
> instance, and that will clearly increase the complexity and cost of
> processing standards as well as slow the publishing process down

Todd, I don't think anyone suggested that the IETF switch to
multiple languages. That would be a bad move, IMHO. The point
was that even when staying with English, different meeting
styles can make it harder or easier for ESL folks to participate.

Personally, I'd say the IETF is doing pretty well in this
regard compared to many other standardization forums; we do
a lot of our work in the mailing lists where everything is
written down, you can take your time to work through the
text etc. However, in the meetings the situation is not
as easy as that. The aggressive style, the quick pace
(typically we have just 6 hours of f2f time per *year*
per group). It makes a big difference who is speaking,
too. Some folks should just slow down; I know cases
where the discussion partners of an important discussion
in some WG simply could not decipher what the fast speaking
partner was saying.

And of course, the worst case scenario is an ESL speaker
(original language X) speaks incomprehensible English
and another ESL person (original language Y) tries to
understand ;-)

--Jari