>>>> "ST" == Stephen J Turnbull
<turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> writes:
ST> But I think that many non-English speakers would find it very
ST> attractive, and for many languages there are well-organized and
ST> productive translation teams. I suspect that if the I18N facility
ST> were well-designed, many Western European languages would have full
ST> catalogs within a year (granted, they are the ones where it's least
ST> needed :-( ).
We already have menubar translations via X resources, albeit poorly
documented and incomplete. But there is certainly work left to do
there for interested translators that involves no programming.
(martin@lasker) /xemacs/mule-packages $ find etc/app-defaults
etc/app-defaults
etc/app-defaults/de
etc/app-defaults/de/Emacs
etc/app-defaults/fr
etc/app-defaults/fr/Emacs
etc/app-defaults/ja
etc/app-defaults/ja/Emacs
etc/app-defaults/ro
etc/app-defaults/ro/Emacs
ST> Personally, I think doing it well is hard, and of little benefit to
ST> _current_ core XEmacs constituency. I think doing a good job, with
ST> catalogs, would be very attractive to many non-English-speaking
ST> _potential_ users.
Doing translation for strings generated within XEmacs is a minefield.
I recommend staying away. The following are safe (and easy):
- more translations for the menubar.
- better automatic recognition of when to translate menubar messages
based on LANG or LC_MESSAGES.
- translations of the builtin docstrings. Just use a different DOC
file (we'd have to keep the old DOC file as a fallback).
Any volunteers? Where are those Croatian menubar translations, to
make Hrvoje's friends less Mule-hostile?
Martin