Re: i18n - Revisited

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Apr 28, 2017, at 1:24, Fernando Botelho <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> I now have some difficult decisions to make. GNU Emaccs is the best choice, 
> given how seriously this group takes licensing, but the point of my project 
> is to popularize powerful free tools among non-technical users for whom they 
> could have a huge impact, such as the blind.

Technical people (even blind) already have ccess to emacs. I'm not sure non 
technical people have a lot of uses for emacs, so maybe you could focus on 
other GNU software, like Nano etc.

> But it is hard enough to convince people to adopt an entirely different 
> working paradigm, i.e. interface, now I have to also convince them to adopt a 
> new language? This essentially means keeping this tool reserved for a small 
> fraction of the intellectual elites in each developing country.

UI l10n requires a complex infrastructure that presently does not exist for 
emacs. The best you can do now is provide access to the emacs documentation, 
which would be a huge thing anyway. UI terms can be considered arbitrary and 
once you start using them (after reading about them in a translated doc set) 
they can be seen as some sort of "code". No need to worry about the 
intellectual "elite". Even partial l10n can do a lot to bridge linguistic gaps.

Jean-Christophe