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Re: A system for localizing documentation strings


From: Jason Rumney
Subject: Re: A system for localizing documentation strings
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2007 17:03:24 +0100
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 (Windows/20070716)

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 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.

Conversely, if I am reading the code for a short function, and cannot
see the documentation at the same time as the code because there are 15
translations in between causing the small function definition to take up
more than one screen, then I lose a huge amount of time.

If you are primarily interested in the documention, you will be using
describe-function anyway. If you are primarily interested in the code,
you don't want an excessive amount of inline documentation getting in
the way.


> I think (but I may be wrong) that you consider anything that is not
> English as "translations" and English as a gold standard.

That is the way it must be for any globally used software. Perhaps as a
Frenchman living in Japan you feel that is unfair, but the fact is that
English is the most widely understood language there is.


> It is important to _not_ think that way to be able to offer the most
> flexible framework possible.

I think flexibility in this regard is important for translators, but not
for end users. So rather than a primative system where translators look
at the code, and write their translations from there, we should come up
with either a special mode to make it easy for translators to enter
translations while looking at the documentation strings in a particular
language (which need not be English), or a set of export and import
functions for interacting with existing tools for translation.





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