Re: Why emacs have not native language menu

[Tassilo Horn]

Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp> writes:

Hi Jean-Christophe,

>> Also, emacs has a gazillion extension packages developed mostly by
>> one author each and those won't be localized anyway. IMHO a program
>> that uses one language and the same terminology everywhere is much
>> better than a mixture of (possibly bad) localizations and original
>> content.
>
> Do you actually use localized applications

No, but my girlfriend does. And If I use her computer I'm literally lost
in translation. Not that I didn't understand German (that's my native
language), but because a lot of terms cannot be sensibly translated.

Let's take "Kill Buffer" as an example. That would be "Töte
Zwischenspeicher" in German or "tuer cet amortisseur" in French if you
translate it literally. Ok, literal translation won't be done by good
localizers, but it's really hard to translate a concept like "killing"
in emacs consistently.

> or do you just suppose that localizers are less good at doing their
> jobs then coders at doing theirs?

No, I'm just saying that authors of extension packages won't localize
their packages because they don't know all required languages. And it
won't be possible in the general case to find volunteers who do it for
them.

>> And finally I think there's no real demand for localizations. The
>> average emacs user is a techie, a programer or maybe an author -- at
>> least somebody who needs to edit huge amounts of text
>
> And that means that technical writers who use OpenOffice can't be
> bothered with localizations?

OO.org is not mainly for techies, but for anyone using a computer to
write a letter for example. So it simply has to be localized to be
useful for the average user.

> Who are you trying to convince here?

I'm just saying that it's not worth it. It may be possible somehow to
implement the technical infrastructure, but I don't think there are
enough translators who are willing to create translations.

Bye,
Tassilo