Re: i18n - Revisited

[Fernando Botelho <Fernando.Botelho@F123.org>]

I agree with you overall. Not the scenario I had in mind initially, but 
a worthy cause nonetheless.

I did not mean to imply that no blind person had access to Emacs, just 
that those that currently use it are unusually technically smart or 
unusually well-connected and informed, or both.

I do disagree that non-technical people would not have use for Emacs. 
Someone involved in translations, writing, project management, or any 
number of other tasks could really benefit from Emacs. Sadly for those 
of us who are not technical, the tipical Emacs user is not terribly good 
in sales and marketing. I could have saved myself countless wasted hours 
in the last two decades, had someone I met in college been more pushy 
about the superiority of his digital environment.

Not his fault, of course, but I will try to do some of that "selling", 
thus the concern with language.

Thanks again for your guidance,

Fernando


On 04/27/2017 01:33 PM, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
>> On Apr 28, 2017, at 1:24, Fernando Botelho <Fernando.Botelho@F123.org> wrote:
>>
>> I now have some difficult decisions to make. GNU Emaccs is the best choice, given how seriously this group takes licensing, but the point of my project is to popularize powerful free tools among non-technical users for whom they could have a huge impact, such as the blind.
> Technical people (even blind) already have ccess to emacs. I'm not sure non technical people have a lot of uses for emacs, so maybe you could focus on other GNU software, like Nano etc.
>
>> But it is hard enough to convince people to adopt an entirely different working paradigm, i.e. interface, now I have to also convince them to adopt a new language? This essentially means keeping this tool reserved for a small fraction of the intellectual elites in each developing country.
> UI l10n requires a complex infrastructure that presently does not exist for emacs. The best you can do now is provide access to the emacs documentation, which would be a huge thing anyway. UI terms can be considered arbitrary and once you start using them (after reading about them in a translated doc set) they can be seen as some sort of "code". No need to worry about the intellectual "elite". Even partial l10n can do a lot to bridge linguistic gaps.
>
> Jean-Christophe