Re: Summary (Re: A system for localizing documentation strings)

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

On 31 juil. 07, at 01:43, Richard Stallman wrote:

>     In concrete terms it means that if the locale language in  
> English and
>     the elisp code documentation is in English elisp-mode will display
>     the English documentation.
>
> Do you mean the major mode, Lisp mode?

This is what I mean.

>     If the locale language is Japanese and the elisp code  
> documentation
>     is in Japanese or in English but with a Japanese translation
>     available then elisp-mode will display the Japanese.
>
> Do you mean that the translated documentation strings would
> appear in the Lisp source files in place of the actual doc
> string text?

This is what I mean.

> If so, what would it do if you try to edit the file?

The edit would modify the file.

If the documentation had been in the oiginal English then an edit  
would modify that original English. If the displayed documentation  
were to be the Japanese string, then the Japanese data would be  
edited (to eventually be later saved).

Although I am sure I don't understand all the implications of what I  
just wrote and all the implication of using gettext for the whole  
localization process, my impression is that by using the compiled  
data provided by gettext we considerably limit ourselves regarding  
how much flexibility we can have with the textual data provided by  
the translations.

This is one of the reason why at first I imagined a kind of  
specialized "code folding" device to display only the locale relevant  
translated documentation strings.

Jean-Christophe Helary