Re: A system for localizing documentation strings

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp> writes:

> I am amazed English programmers still believe their industry still
> revolves around their native language. This has not been the case
> for more than a decade: exactly when my small town bookstore stopped
> to sell the English versions of O'Reilly's books. Now most of them
> are translated. SUN's books are translated. Knuth's books are
> translated.
>
> There is absolutely _no_ need whatsoever for Japanese people to
> learn _any_ bit of English to become excellent programmers.

A colleague of mine encountered some sort of tutorial or whatever that
included PostScript.  The book had been translated into German very
thoroughly, including all the PostScript operators in the examples.
Needless to say, the examples would no longer work.

As long as all reserved words are written in English, and non-ASCII
letters can't even be made identifiers, there is already preselection
happening in the program ecosystem.  And then there is the existing
code base.  Not least of all, that of the GNU project.  With all of
its program comments (which are not treated with i18n).

Yes, users more and more get the option of conversing with their
applications in their native language.  But programmers miss out on a
lot of important code if they lack English.

-- 
David Kastrup