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| From: | Jean-Christophe Helary |
| Subject: | Re: Why emacs have not native language menu |
| Date: | Tue, 24 Jul 2007 21:18:31 +0900 |
On 24 juil. 07, at 20:29, Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
Of course, as anybody I'd prefer to use software that speaks to me in a language I understand, but if the language of the author of the software is in the list of languages I understand, I prefer to use that software in the author's language, because it will be clearer and much less risky. Also, when software is translated (you can take MacOS and MacOSX as very bad examples. I mean the translation is almost perfect, but the result is awful), you cannot help the users anymore. Pathnames change, program names changes, menu, buttons, everything. You can't understand the error message anymore (I have to translate them back from my native tongue to English to understand them! etc).
You need to use more localized software maybe. You'll notice that there are plenty of locale based communities that provide support, tutorials, code etc.
Of course, we all know that for a corporation market division is very good (it allows them to put higher prices in the submarkets). But for users these translations is costly in more than one way.
I fail to see the rationale behind this opinion.
My advice would be that if you feel you have the energy to do such a thing as translating emacs, you should rather work toward singularity, because then you could let the AI do the translation for you. It should be more interesting to work ten years on AI than on translating.
No because localization of free software is part of the computer literacy project that is included _within_ the free software project.
There will always be new people who need to start from the lowest step. It is useless to find an all-encompassing solution that will intellectually benefit a few members of the elite programming community will leaving the others spoon-fed and unable to climb that very first step.
Look at Apple, they've been translating their OS for almost 30 years, and their current computers is not significantly better or even different than what they had in 1984. (Some benchmarks tend to show that a Mac+ with 6.0.8 is even better than current systems).
That is a possibility but obviously there are much more Japanese or French people who use their software now than then.
What good is a software package if it can't be used by linguistically challenged people ?
Jean-Christophe Helary
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