i18n (was: reverting/notifying of files that no longer exist)

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

Karl Chen <quarl@hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu> writes:
> BTW, I don't know if Emacs coding standards say much regarding
> internationalization, but in general it's better to write out
>    (message "%s changed on disk...")
> and
>    (message "%s renamed or deleted on disk...")
> for translation. 
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/gettext_15.html)

According to those guidelines the right way to translate messages is
to call the `gettext' function on messages before placeholders in them
get expanded with arguments, i.e. to write:

(message (gettext "File %s renamed") filename)

However, this might not be the best solution for Emacs, since it has
several powerful mechanisms like regexps to avoid the need to add
`gettext' functions to every `message' call.  So after the call to
(message "File %s renamed" filename) the function `message' receives
a string like "File /some/path/somefile renamed" and could use a
variable with translation mappings to performs regexp replacements
before messages get displayed in the echo area, e.g.:

(defvar message-translations
 '(("some_language_name" "^File \\(.?+\\) renamed$" "Elif \1 demaner")
   (... ... ...)))

Anyway, I believe this feature is for Emacs 22, and etc/TODO already
has an entry for that.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/