Re: Why emacs have not native language menu

[William Case <billlinux@rogers.com>]

Hi;

Just to add some real life experience.

On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 17:25 +0200, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> Am 24.07.2007 um 14:30 schrieb Pascal Bourguignon:
> 
[snip]
> Yes, that's another item: a function or variable name in English  
> describes itself to most GNU Emacs users. I often wonder whether I  
> should use English or German names for variables or macros in LaTeX,  
> Shell, or Perl. When I am sure that the source won't reach the  
> Internet, then German is fine.
> 
> And now imagine the function or variable names are also written in  
> Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Indic, Cyrillic letters ...
> 
> 
> Anyway, I think and feel an "official" interface for Unicode enabled  
> localisation of menus and their entries and of messages in *Messages*  
> buffer and/or echo area is needed. There is no need to let the nice  
> Latin script dominate the whole world.

I live in Ottawa, and have lived most my life in Eastern Canda. My
mother tongue is English, but I can speak enough French not to starve to
death, find a place to live etc. etc.

I recently bought a brand name printer.  The front end instructions were
in English.  All the error codes, readmes, manuals etc. were in French.
Me and Mr. Roget always end up with nonsense when we try to read one of
those manuals.  My francophone friends assure me it is just as
frustrating the other way around.

On the other side, the Canadian government requires that most equipment
purchased by the Federal Government come with French documentation as
well as English.  Those francophone friends of mine who work on and
maintain that equipment (from computers to fighter planes) confess that
they always use the English manuals.  They say they do so because the
original manuals tend to be more accurate than the translated manuals
and because just sharing one manual at work insures that they see any
hand written notes or update memos.

There are arguments for both sides.  I come down on the side that says
let a person have what they want or need within their own personal
space.  For the rest, as the world gets smaller and smaller we are all
going to be bumping into someone else's language.  We had better get
used to it.  We had better figure out how to handle it.  What's going to
happen if the next killer app comes out of China or Uganda?

-- 
Regards Bill