Re: Internationalize Emacs's messages (swahili)

[Daniel Brooks]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Daniel Brooks <db48x@db48x.net>
>> Cc: all_but_last@163.com,  bugs@gnu.support,  dimech@gmx.com,
>>   abrochard@gmx.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org,  rms@gnu.org
>> Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2020 01:07:50 -0800
>> 
>> Yes, I am aware of ngettext, and I could have picked a different
>> example. Consider the example from projectfluent.org, where the output
>> should change based on the user's gender:
>
> I think this issue is largely irrelevant to Emacs (and to translating
> program messages in general), since it customary nowadays to avoid
> gender-specific language.  We certainly do that in Emacs.

Agreed, which is why I went on with the other example. The main point is
that it is generalizable to other kinds of variation besides just
plurals. Gettext does plurals, but nothing else.

>> > How many translated languages for how many programs does this project
>> > have?
>> 
>> The main one that I know of is Firefox, which by my count has 96
>> translations.
>
> I didn't mean one program, I meant the total count.  It should be
> indicative to how easy it is to find people who are both programmers
> and can succinctly express themselves on technical issues in their
> native languages.  IME, it is very hard to find such people.

I don't know the full count, I only know that Mozilla uses it for
Firefox as well as all of their web pages, and that most of those
translations are maintained by volunteers. Those volunteers are clearly
capable of doing the job, since there are 96 actively-maintained
translations for Firefox, which is a complex application which is hard
to translate. I think we can find similarly-capable volunteers to help
translate Emacs once the infrastructure is in place. I don't think most
of those people will already know either gettext or fluent
syntax. They'll learn as they go, just like the rest of us do.

db48x