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Re: A system for localizing documentation strings
From: |
Jean-Christophe Helary |
Subject: |
Re: A system for localizing documentation strings |
Date: |
Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:42:56 +0900 |
On 27 juil. 07, at 00:10, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
It's not that simple, because in practice many .el files that come
with Emacs are maintained by people who also offer the last version
from some Web site. So in practice, I think we do need to have the
translations on separate files even for bundled packages. And since
you agree that this should be supported anyway, for the benefit of
unbundled packages, there's no reason not to use this infrastructure
for bundled ones as well. There are only advantages to this, I don't
see any disadvantages.
The fact that the code (.el) will only contain the English string
defeats one of the purposes of the localization.
If I read code and I need to check a separate file all the time to
see what the French says then I loose a huge amount of time.
I think (but I may be wrong) that you consider anything that is not
English as "translations" and English as a gold standard.
It is important to _not_ think that way to be able to offer the most
flexible framework possible.
The "literate programming" style that elisp/emacs has adopted
_requires_ to be language agnostic as much as possible.
Why do we need the source language?
Because as soon as we have a system that allows for localization we
can expect to have "native" code written and so we'll have to
reference the source language that _will_ be different from English.
We don't want people who don't master English to produce weird
English in their descriptions because the system implies
source=English.
I don't see a problem. Programmers who don't master English can
supply the documentation in their native language, and someone else
will provide the English equivalent to be installed in the .el file
before it is installed; after, all most maintainers who have write
access to the repository have good command of English. The original
(non-English) documentation gets installed as one of the translated
messages.
Here again, you see the process as an English based process.
If we are to provide a localization+translation framework we need to
identify all the languages (including English and its different
dialects if necessary, that is ISO 639) to provide the most
flexibility possible. In fact, the biggest mistake of gettext and
similar l10n processes was to imply that English was to be the gold
standard of documentation from which everything should be translated.
Massive l10n activities around the free world have proved that this
paradigm was overly limiting and recent developments of gettext seem
to include the possibility to have other languages in source.
The fact that the "main" emacs is centered on English _currently_
does not say anything about the state of the code in 10 years from now.
Also, we should keep in mind that Lisp primitives (those
implemented in
C) have their doc strings as C comments, not as C strings. The
infrastructure developed for Emacs l10n should provide solution for
the primitives as well, and the solution will have to be different
both from your suggestion above and from the traditional gettext-
style
message catalog.
Could that part be concieved separatly ?
It will be a separate solution, but it needs to be designed and
implemented together with the one for *.el files, since it doesn't
make sense to have a localized Emacs where all the primitives are
still documented only in English.
I see. Thank you for your comments.
Jean-Christophe Helary
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, (continued)
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, Jean-Christophe Helary, 2007/07/27
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, Richard Stallman, 2007/07/28
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, Henrik Enberg, 2007/07/27
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, Werner LEMBERG, 2007/07/27
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, Eli Zaretskii, 2007/07/27
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, David Kastrup, 2007/07/27
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, Richard Stallman, 2007/07/28
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, Eli Zaretskii, 2007/07/26
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings,
Jean-Christophe Helary <=
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, Jason Rumney, 2007/07/26
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, Jean-Christophe Helary, 2007/07/26
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, Richard Stallman, 2007/07/27
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, Eli Zaretskii, 2007/07/26
- Re: A system for localizing documentation strings, David Kastrup, 2007/07/26
Re: Fwd: A system for localizing documentation strings, Andreas Schwab, 2007/07/26