Re: i18n - Revisited

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Fernando Botelho <Fernando.Botelho@F123.org>
> Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2017 13:24:20 -0300
> 
> "I participated to a discussion here about that a few years ago and the 
> answer I got was "people who use emacs know English (or should) so there 
> is no need for l10n in the UI"..."
> 
> Sad. There is maybe a billion persons around the world that deserve and 
> could access the productivity of Emacs and lack the language skill to 
> work in English.
> 
> I recognize the attitude and short-sightedness, I was just not expecting 
> to find it here.

Beware: you are making conclusions from a single citation out of what
was a very long discussion with different issues brought up.  I
suggest that you read that discussion yourself, before making up your
mind.

AFAIR, the main issue was not as expressed by the above citation, but
some fundamental problems with localizing Emacs.  Some of those
problems, off the top of my head:

 . command names are deliberately English, and probably always will be
 . built-in documentation is partially automatically produced from the
   command and variable names, and from the code which implements them
   (e.g., some UI elements visible on display come directly from
   symbol names, which are in English)
 . part of the doc strings are in C sources, part in Lisp
 . l10n of unbundled packages presents additional issues, out of
   control for the project
 . Emacs has an awful lot of doc strings, so translating them, even
   after the other problems are solved, is a humongously large job

The project's position is that work in these areas is very welcome,
but it's quite clear that a group of very motivated individuals will
have to materialize in order to make it happen.