Re: Summary (Re: A system for localizing documentation strings)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 11:08:43 +0200
> From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jan_Dj=E4rv?= <jan.h.d@swipnet.se>
> Cc: Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> I'd say no.  Once upon a time there was some swedish MS Excel version that had
> all functions translated to swedih.  That didn't work so well when trying to
> open a spreadsheet from the US...
> 
> If we wan't to be able to use an international .emacs everywhere, variables
> must have just one name globally.  Even if some people find it sad, english
> seems to be the best.

Don't forget that Emacs can display any string as some other string.
So, for example, "Help" could be displayed as "Hilfe" in the German
localized version.  There's more than one Emacs feature we could use
for that (text properties, overlays, display tables).

As for "M-x foo", we could have `intern' look up a translated string
first, before actually interning the symbol.

But I agree that localizing the symbol names should be the last piece
of Emacs localization.