My Broken English — 語言、文化與全球開源協作的摩擦

Source recordings: 新錄音 31 & 32 Speaker: Naruhiko Ogasawara (per schedule) — Japanese open-source developer COSCUP session: 「My broken English…」, Room TR410, Day 1 Topic tags: Non-native English speakers, open-source collaboration, documentation culture, GitHub vs. Subversion, cross-cultural communication

One-line summary

A candid, personal reflection from a Japanese developer on the friction non-native English speakers face contributing to global open source — how he taught himself English, why documentation gaps are really culture gaps, and how native/non-native speakers split apart in international meetings.

This is a experience/reflection talk, not a technical one. There are no repos or tools to track down — the value is the lived account. The transcript is heavily disfluent (code-switched English/Japanese, ASR-mangled), so the notes below reconstruct the argument rather than quote.

The core argument

For an Asian, non-native English developer, the hardest thing about open source isn't the code — it's expressing your project to the world in a common language. As he puts it in Japanese, "that's the hardest part."

How he learned English (three self-taught methods)

1. Drawing/illustration to the point of exhaustion — learned by making visual material relentlessly ("死ぬほど学んだ").
2. Asking a translation team to teach him — and being firmly told: never just paste in program output / raw code as a substitute for explaining. Explain in words.
3. Online gaming with foreigners — endless conversation with non-Japanese players. This taught him a regional lesson (below).

The West-Coast / East-Coast observation

A recurring, half-joking theme:

• West Coast (San Francisco-area) people — relaxed about English; you can speak messily and it's fine. "They don't think much about English," so no problem talking casually.
• East Coast (New York) people — expect you to speak seriously/properly, or they genuinely get annoyed. He notes he "often gets scolded" there.
• He mentions a New York-born participant in the same MCP/CROSS session who was reportedly frustrated by Japanese speakers' English when first arriving in Japan.
• Argentina people and others were friendly and easy to speak with; "some guys from the east US" were the hard ones.

Documentation gaps are culture gaps

The deepest point of the talk:

• He repeatedly asked project maintainers to explain a feature's mechanism so he could integrate it into his own open-source process — and was refused several times. Not out of malice: the other party wouldn't (or couldn't) document it.
• This was in the Subversion era, before GitHub — so there was no easy shared mechanism to point at. He asked "I don't understand this mechanism, please teach me" multiple times and never got an answer, so he couldn't add the feature.
• His conclusion: these blockers ultimately trace back to cultural difference. When both sides are non-native and cultures differ, communication breaks down — and some people, even after open-sourcing code, keep working in a closed way and won't leave documentation.
• His own stance: 真正的 open source means accepting many people's input. Even without GitHub back then, he published his own work properly as open source, welcomed any comments, and wanted to spread it widely — because open source is about taking in everyone's contributions.

The native / non-native split in global meetings

• In global meetings, the real problem is that native and non-native speakers cleanly separate — the conversation bifurcates.
• His ask: native speakers should show respect (he stumbles on the word "regression"/"respect" in the recording) toward non-native speakers rather than leaving them behind.
• An aside on Indian English: he found it hard to parse at first and had to check carefully what was meant; he also encountered strong pride that made collaboration difficult in specific cases. He explicitly frames these as exceptions / individual cases, not a generalization — and says working with genuinely diverse people on open source is simply very hard, but worth it.

Takeaway for the reader

There's nothing to install here. The session is a reminder that the barriers to global open-source participation are linguistic and cultural, and that "just write documentation" is easier said than done when documentation itself is a cultural practice not everyone shares. If you run a project with international contributors, the actionable version of his plea is: document mechanisms explicitly, and give non-native speakers room and respect in synchronous discussion.

Note on transcript quality

This is the most degraded recording in the set — rapid code-switching between broken English and Japanese, with long ASR-garbled stretches. The reconstruction leans on the Japanese passages (which transcribe more cleanly) for the actual argument. Speaker identity is from the schedule; treat direct claims as paraphrase and verify against the session video before citing.