Renoise has lots of specific features, and little cool things that really improve the workflow, and make it a good tool for electronic musicians. However mastering those cool features requires a good learning curve (a few weeks of intensive practice ). When we were beginners, some of us had to hardly hang on the interface, and they all have been rewarded with satisfying results.
But when you hang on this way, it’s because you know that given explanations will be understood for sure. Let’s say that through all this learning curve where you have to hang on during the few first weeks : knowing a “technical” english is really helpfull. It’s helpfull to read the manual, to understand the tutorials, to get in touch with the renoise dev. team and renoise power users, to ask questions and read answers, to understand good ways to program music in elegant and efficient ways, it’s helpfull to hang on to Renoise itself.
Because I was born in a house where some commodore 64 chip music or electronic sequenced music was played all the time, soundtrackers immediately attracted me, and since I can read and speak english, I’ve been able to read the manual, and get the meaning of the tips of the day, get the meaning of the tooltips, the way to use the software and its main functionnalities. But I know some people in my country that would like to use Renoise and that are completely lost in translation. And when they use “Google translate”, it’s doing a mediocre or average job - especially when it’s time for dealing with technical things. I’ve tried to give them some assistance, but this assistance isn’t easy. And I often see good musicians giving up, just because they see Renoise as something simply too strange, too hard and too complex. To my eyes : it’s a problem of localization.
It would be cool if first of all the Renoise GUI text labels (messageboxes labels, tab labels, menu labels, toottips labels, button labels, error messages…), were located outside of the binary code, and available in an external (and editable) xml file. Putting all of this an in “external” file would help power users to build localized interfaces. Imagine the Renoise GUI available in german, but also, in french, in spanish, in danish, swedish, italian… We could even make renoise more easy to use with specific gui fonts for russian or japanese people, why not arabic or greek people, you see.
Of course modifying some labels in the interface will just be a starting point, the next step would be to put help-like “?” buttons, on the right side of every box, opening help boxes, explainging everything that need to be explained, and those words could also be found inside the same external xml file, and that you could simply translate, you see. Lots of usefull elements are sometimes lost somewhere in the manual, and it’s not that obvious to quit the interface and check the manual : renoise could make everything easier by bringing help directly “inside”, the GUI … what would also make it more efficient during the learing curve and not just after the learning curve, you see.
Having in mind that most of the literature regarding DSP and acoustics is not available in my native language or those books which are available are very basic I don’t see any other way than simply learning english.