Re: Possible change to startup.el

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Miles Bader <snogglethorpe@gmail.com> writes:

> On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 17:15:35 +0900 (JST), Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org> wrote:
>> > If you've got flag icons, then it could be "in LANGUAGE (FLAG)" for
>> > even more super-standout appeal...
>> 
>> What kind of flag do you mean?  If you mean "national flag",
>> I think it's a very bad idea.
>
> Why?

Well, I googled for flag icons, and there has been quite some uproar
on the Gnome list about that.  For one thing, it is rather annoying
for multi-lingual states since they don't have a flag for every
language.  And it may also be annoying to, say, the Swiss who get to
see flags of a bunch of different nations for the languages they speak
themselves.

For another, distributing any product in mainland China with a
Taiwanese flag is prohibited seemingly.

In short, it appears that flags are, apart from the mismatch between
state and language, loaded with connotations that the more naive under
us (like I am) are not able to fathom easily.  Sigh.

So I'd second the suggestion to translate the current locale into a
string, maybe something like

    hands-on tutorial (in Bulgarian and more).

Wait, wouldn't it be more friendly to make this

    "Deutsches Tutorial zum schnellen Erlernen von Emacs"

if we are doing a translation for the splash screen?  (Cogs turn).
While we are at it, we should offer the locale-identified national
tutorial "Deutsches Tutorial" as the top menu entry in "Help", letting
"other languages" follow behind (however, that would strongly that we
can be reasonably sure that the menus will support the charset
corresponding to the current locale.  We'd still have a menu entry for
"Tutorial (many languages)" as a fallback, so if occasionally junk
gets displayed, this will not be a total catastrophe, but it better
not crash).

And, uh, splash screen.  We are talking about 30 lines of text here.
I think we have a _significantly_ increased chance of jogging people's
attention to available Emacs resources if we translate the whole
splash kaboodle into the 15 languages or so that are involved here.

If people agree that this might be a good idea, I'd volunteer for
German.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum