Re: character sets as they relate to “Raw†string literals for elisp

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2021 18:25:07 -0400
> Cc: eliz@gnu.org, monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> So given my experience, I seriously doubt that volunteer translations
> will reach a sufficiently high quality.  At the very least, such an
> effort should be organized and coordinated in a serious way on a
> cross-project level.  Perhaps GNU as a whole is big enough to do it as a
> project.  Maybe.  But Emacs?  I doubt it.

We are currently talking about providing infrastructure for
translation.  As long as there's no such infrastructure, talking about
translations and their quality is not useful.

> Even multilingual messages would be a large effort, and in the case of
> Emacs it is still not clear that it would be of much use.  You would
> immediately run into the brick-wall of English documentation, English
> symbols, etc. etc.

This has been discussed.  The conclusions were that yes, if you want
to be able to translate all of Emacs, it is probably impractical.  But
translating some of it should be doable.  For example, echo-area
messages in Emacs are not different from messages shown by text-mode
programs, and those all have message catalogs translated into many
languages.  There's no reason enthusiasts shouldn't be able to do the
same for Emacs.  There's no reason to require or expect that every
message will be translated, either

Yes, translation of program messages is hard, and there are many bad
translations.  But it is not impossible to produce good translations.

> That said, it sounds infinitely more doable than translating all
> documentation, especially if we limit the scope to just some major
> languages like Mandarin, Arabic and Spanish.

No one seriously talks about translating all our documentation.