The discussion so far seems to point at modifying 'message' and the likes so that developers don't have to bother with any l10n mechanism on their part (besides for writing clean strings). ==================================================== On May 27, 2017, at 10:52, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote: > My very uninformed idea is that we need an independent function that handles the preferred language check and the catalog parsing based on a key, and all the string displaying functions (message etc) would be redefined to call that function when a non default preferred langage (currently English) is detected. On May 27, 2017, at 16:43, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > Yes but from what I've seen in package/el, a lot of translatable texts are not displayed with "message". Some > use "error", some use other mechanisms. Internally, they all boil down to a small set of C functions, which is where we should make these changes. ==================================================== Since it's C, I'm not going to be able to contribute to that before I understand the language, and the function definitions. I guess it's time I open that K&R that's been on my shelves forever... Jean-Christophe