Re: i18n/gettext?

[Richard Stallman]

    > We could put something somewhere to remind people not to enter 
translations
    > for those strings.

    I did that in my experiment with GNU tar.  I put comments just before
    the strings in the source, in such a way that the comments also
    appeared just before the strings in the translation files.  It didn't
    work.  The translators didn't see the comments, or didn't understand
    them, and went ahead and translated the strings anyway.

Perhaps something in gettext could remind them at the time they are
entering translations.  That might work.

    > There are just a few strings in startup.el which should not be
    > translated for this reason.  Maybe we could mark them specifically
    > for non-translation.

    That would be a better approach -- i.e. don't let the human
    translators see the strings in the first place.

Ok, let's use this solution in Emacs.  We just won't try to translate
these strings, so if someone writes a translation for them, it won't
have any effect.