Re: Why emacs have not native language menu

[Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>>>> Today I tried vim 7.1,It have native language menu.
>>>> Why emacs only have English menu?
>
> Because nobody has gone through the trouble of adding localization yet.
> As for why, I would guess it's a mix of difficulty (need someone who
> understand enough of Emacs and of localization to deal with it both at the
> C and the Lisp level), together with the fact that it's bound to stay
> partial:
> - many elements are sufficiently dynamic that it's going to be
>   difficult to add support to translate them.
> - an important side of Emacs is that it exposes a lot of its internals: many
>   important commands are reached via M-x where the term you enter is the
>   name of a function (i.e. not quite a string), and all the online help
>   refers to those things as well.
>
> Still, it's quite doable.  The only difficulty is to have the courage to
> start with something small and convince other people that it's worthwhile to
> go down that road.

That's the problem.  I don't think localization is a good thing at all.

Of course, as anybody I'd prefer to use software that speaks to me in
a language I understand, but if the language of the author of the
software is in the list of languages I understand, I prefer to use
that software in the author's language, because it will be clearer and
much less risky.  Also, when software is translated (you can take
MacOS and MacOSX as very bad examples. I mean the translation is
almost perfect, but the result is awful), you cannot help the users
anymore.  Pathnames change, program names changes, menu, buttons,
everything.  You can't understand the error message anymore (I have to
translate them back from my native tongue to English to understand
them! etc).

Of course, we all know that for a corporation market division is very
good (it allows them to put higher prices in the submarkets).  But for
users these translations  is costly in more than one way.



In any case we are in front of an important dilema. On one side, it
would be very nice if every body spoke the same language and used the
same emacs.  But on the other side, it would be too risky, as risky as
when every body uses the same MS-Word.


My advice would be that if you feel you have the energy to do such a
thing as translating emacs, you should rather work toward singularity,
because then you could let the AI do the translation for you.  It
should be more interesting to work ten years on AI than on
translating.  Look at Apple, they've been translating their OS for
almost 30 years, and their current computers is not significantly
better or even different than what they had in 1984.  (Some benchmarks
tend to show that a Mac+ with 6.0.8 is even better than current
systems).


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/