Re: Why emacs have not native language menu

[Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com>]

Hadron <hadronquark@googlemail.com> writes:

> Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> writes:
>
>> 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.
>
> I find that very difficult to agree with.

But this is what I think.


To be more precise, I could say that localization won't be a good
thing until singularity.  Then of course it won't matter because it
will be automatic. (But let's hope it will be faster than human
translators who had to work 11 years with the author to translate
GEB...)



>> 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
>
> Not if you don't speak that language .....

But we all speak English!!!


My point is that it's easier to teach everybody a worldwide language
(I'd vote for either Latin or Esperanto, but nobody asked me and they
all started to speak English for no good reason), than to mess with
localizations.

Our energies would be better spent on working on the Singularity than
that.


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

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