Re: Key bindings proposal

[Stuart Hacking]

On 4 Aug 2010, at 17:19, Tom wrote:

> Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy <at> cs.bham.ac.uk> writes:
>> 
>>> In Emacs you have key bindings and M-x, no need for menus.
>> 
>> Yes, that is one "language".  Nobody denies that!
>> 
> 
> Which brings the question: is Emacs only targeted to English-speaking 
> users? Internationalization is a natural feature of modern software.
> 
> 
> 


Just a few thoughts:

Won't we encounter problems due to much of Emacs' UI being closely tied to the 
underlying source code?

Even in software that is localised, the source code is usually in English. 
Emacs goes a step further by 
having much documentation written inline with the code.

A lot of the emacs documentation comes from source code doc-strings, command 
names, arguments. As I see it, we 
could at best hope for partial localisation. It would be a large effort 
 to achieve 100%.

Tasks (and issues):

* Translate Info Files

        There's a lot of this type of documentation for the manuals, but 
translating it wouldn't impact 
functionality.

* Translate function documentation

        Documentation strings are inline with the actual code. Thus, 
translation would 
mean either duplicating all the libraries (no), separating the documentation 
from the 
code (no), or keeping the English documentation with the code, but translating 
it and implementing
a build process that will do the compile time substitution?

* Translate the function names

        Probably not even necessary.

* Translate the menu items and other UI strings

        Are any of these generated from function names? For inline strings, 
perhaps they could be 
extracted - but would this make it harder to read the code? Perhaps the same 
suggestion as the
inline documentation applies? (leaving the english, but implementing a string 
substitution process)

I think there would be not insignificant changes to the build process and 
possibly some re-architecturing where 
string management is concerned. Is there a big demand for localisation?

--Stuart