Re: Accelerator I18N [was: I don't wont the f* underlinings ...]
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> writes:
>>>>> "Hrvoje" == Hrvoje Niksic
<hniksic(a)iskon.hr> writes:
Hrvoje> One's desire to have things translated to his tongue
Hrvoje> should not reduce the developer's freedom to change the
Hrvoje> program.
Gratuitous spelling changes in menu items will "unhook" the
translation (see lwlib/xlwmenu.c:massage_resource_name() for exactly
which ones). Shouldn't we restrict freedom at least that much?
IMO translation should be completely orthogonal from program
development. Everything else leads to disaster. It is a matter of
courtesy on the side of the maintainer to avoid frequent frivolous
changes to make things easier for the translators, but he is not
_obliged_.
The one guideline the developer is obliged to do is make sure that the
plurals are formed correctly, i.e. this is forbidden:
(format "%d entr%ss used" num (if (= num 1) "y" "ie"))
Hrvoje> By your standards, nothing UI-wise in XEmacs would
ever
Hrvoje> change, because there's always a possibility that
Hrvoje> _someone_ in _some_ language would misunderstand/misparse
Hrvoje> _something_. I can't hope to disprove that claim.
You needn't bother, because I didn't make it.
I was probably attacking strawmen, but what you stated for the special
case of Japanese certainly sounded like it could be expanded to what I
wrote above.
All I ask is that _discussion_ take place. This serves to (1) warn
the translators that they are about to get a ton of hate mail (2)
give them a chance to kick up a fuss and (3) maybe cause developers
of good will to rethink some planned changes where appropriate.
All of these are fine with me. See the "courtesy of the maintainer"
part above.
Hrvoje> Thai, etc. without proper knowledge of English will
fail
Hrvoje> to understand them. Well, that's what translations are
Hrvoje> for. If that means "fuck I18N" in your book, then you
Hrvoje> have a pretty weird notion of I18N.
So, yes, changing the English menu without understanding how that
impacts the menus in other languages means "fuck I18N" in my book.
Then we need to change how the translations are organized. The whole
point of gettext is to make development and translation as orthogonal
and unaware of each other as it is at all possible. If every single
change to the XEmacs UI requires a consideration for Japanese,
something somewhere is terribly wrong.
I'll have to look at the menu translations. I thought they were done
through a gettext()-like mechanism.