Jan> How about not "translating" the menus at all. Wouldn't it be Jan> almost as much work to simply provide a complete new menubar Jan> for each language (or at least for each major culture group) Jan> so you can address these issues and translation at the same Jan> time. The real killer is that new functionality would only become available on translation (people adding new functionality would not generally be willing or able to add it in all the translated versions). That's unacceptable. We also want menu structure to be the same. I know a number of people who read no Japanese who can use Japanese Windows by closing their eyes and moving the mouse to select menu items geometrically. You should be able to do that in XEmacs, too. Yes, common, stable organization is precisely the issue I was talking about, but that we could maintain with packaged "obsolete" menubars (or Novice | Standard | Comprehensive menubars). We don't really expect our standard menubars to change as radically as in Ben's overhaul very often, especially if we try to synch our "standard" menu system to Windows (which doesn't change radically very often). Anyway, I think maintaining separate menu systems would be a lot more work, actually. One reason is that "translatables" are buried deep in the menu structure, and it would be hard to automate the process of integrating the mass of already translated strings into a new structure. You'd either have to work with side-by-side buffers (the new English version and the old translated version) which have different structures, and thus are hard to correlate, or just start from scratch every time and translate the whole English version. Furthermore, many menus are actually added by loading packages; you'd have to go into those files, too. Finally, gettext (including our current "massaged resources" hack) makes it much less unpleasant for a non-programmer to do the translations, a big plus. There are a number of non-programmers out there aching to contribute (at least they say so ;-). -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."