Re: i18n/gettext?

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Sun, 9 Dec 2001, Paul Eggert wrote:

> translator teams have already chosen encodings, which they use for
> lots of other GNU applications.  These choices are often the result of
> a delicate balance of technical and political considerations.  If GNU
> Emacs is a special case, it will cause confusion among the translation
> teams.

I Think Emacs _is_ a special case, because it supports several languages 
at the same time, and because of other factors.

> I suppose Emacs could use iconv's
> translation capabilities if available, instead of redoing the
> translation itself

If iconv doesn't support the internal representation of characters used 
by Emacs (known as `emacs-mule'), I don't think it's a good idea to use 
iconv.  GNU libiconv used to support emacs-mule, but I don't know how 
up-to-date that support is (Emacs 21 added a few new character sets to 
the internal representation).