Re: Why emacs have not native language menu -- TYPO

[William Case]

On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 11:52 -0400, William Case wrote:
> Hi;
> 
> Just to add some real life experience.
> 
> On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 17:25 +0200, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> > Am 24.07.2007 um 14:30 schrieb Pascal Bourguignon:
> > 
> [snip]
> > Yes, that's another item: a function or variable name in English  
> > describes itself to most GNU Emacs users. I often wonder whether I  
> > should use English or German names for variables or macros in LaTeX,  
> > Shell, or Perl. When I am sure that the source won't reach the  
> > Internet, then German is fine.
> > 
> > And now imagine the function or variable names are also written in  
> > Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Indic, Cyrillic letters ...
> > 
> > 
> > Anyway, I think and feel an "official" interface for Unicode enabled  
> > localisation of menus and their entries and of messages in *Messages*  
> > buffer and/or echo area is needed. There is no need to let the nice  
> > Latin script dominate the whole world.
> 
> I live in Ottawa, and have lived most my life in Eastern Canda. My
> mother tongue is English, but I can speak enough French not to starve to
> death, find a place to live etc. etc.
> 
> I recently bought a brand name printer.  The front end instructions were
> in English.  All the error codes, readmes, manuals etc. were in French.
> Me and Mr. Roget always end up with nonsense when we try to read one of
         ^^^^^^^^^ M. Larousse
> those manuals.  My francophone friends assure me it is just as
> frustrating the other way around.
> 
> On the other side, the Canadian government requires that most equipment
> purchased by the Federal Government come with French documentation as
> well as English.  Those francophone friends of mine who work on and
> maintain that equipment (from computers to fighter planes) confess that
> they always use the English manuals.  They say they do so because the
> original manuals tend to be more accurate than the translated manuals
> and because just sharing one manual at work insures that they see any
> hand written notes or update memos.
> 
> There are arguments for both sides.  I come down on the side that says
> let a person have what they want or need within their own personal
> space.  For the rest, as the world gets smaller and smaller we are all
> going to be bumping into someone else's language.  We had better get
> used to it.  We had better figure out how to handle it.  What's going to
> happen if the next killer app comes out of China or Uganda?
> 
-- 
Regards Bill