From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Pascal Bourguignon Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Why emacs have not native language menu Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:29:18 +0200 Organization: Informatimago Message-ID: <877ioqdoq9.fsf@voyager.informatimago.com> References: <46A49912.9030203@luxdo.jp> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1185277309 2289 80.91.229.12 (24 Jul 2007 11:41:49 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:41:49 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Tue Jul 24 13:41:47 2007 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1IDIlr-0008SX-7T for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:41:43 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1IDIlq-0003Bt-R9 for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 24 Jul 2007 07:41:42 -0400 Original-Path: shelby.stanford.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!newsserver.news.garr.it!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 60 Original-X-Trace: individual.net /lJZGiZUqehdsX2Z9qHBBQGj/mJNng8DPF4qPRlakXCk7si32M Cancel-Lock: sha1:UrNLbCn8/uePTPA2EWwLvf9pV7U= sha1:V99o+0EWP3nNJHX+SScafhKeCQ8= Face: iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAADAAAAAwAQMAAABtzGvEAAAABlBMVEUAAAD///+l2Z/dAAAA oElEQVR4nK3OsRHCMAwF0O8YQufUNIQRGIAja9CxSA55AxZgFO4coMgYrEDDQZWPIlNAjwq9 033pbOBPtbXuB6PKNBn5gZkhGa86Z4x2wE67O+06WxGD/HCOGR0deY3f9Ijwwt7rNGNf6Oac l/GuZTF1wFGKiYYHKSFAkjIo1b6sCYS1sVmFhhhahKQssRjRT90ITWUk6vvK3RsPGs+M1RuR mV+hO/VvFAAAAABJRU5ErkJggg== X-Accept-Language: fr, es, en X-Disabled: X-No-Archive: no User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.94 (gnu/linux) Original-Xref: shelby.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:150354 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:45932 Archived-At: Stefan Monnier 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/