Re: Emacs localization (Re: Why emacs have not native language menu)

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> I am already a member of the translation effort to French (along with 
> other localization projects) but I find translating the manual of a non 
> localized application a waste of time in general, especially in the case 
> of emacs where _most_ of the important stuff _cannot_ currently be 
> localized


Some comments:

There are a couple of things to translate:
- manuals
- help texts
- menus
- interactive commands

* Translating manuals is a big job of course, but straight forward.

* The help texts (shown in the help buffer) are the documentation that 
are written together with the functions and variables etc, like this:

  (defun find-library (library)
     "Find the elisp source of LIBRARY."
    ;; body of function comes here

When this texts are shown in the help buffer they could of course be 
replaced with other texts from some table. Rather straight forward too 
since not very much need to be changed in Emacs. (The English 
documentation should of course just stay where it is. Otherwise it would 
be a nightmare to program.)

* menu texts? Ah, I would not even dream of translating them until menus 
are defined in a more simple manner.

* I believe you agree with me that they should not be translated. 
Translating them would IMO lead to confusion.