Re: Before l10n, better practices for (message) ?

["Göktuğ Kayaalp" <self@gkayaalp.com>]

On 2017-05-27 06:08 +02, Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> wrote:
> On 2017-05-23, at 04:55, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>> Just replace it with 2 different spellings dispatched by the number.
>
> I guess you are aware that 2 different spellings are not enough for
> certain languages...?
>
> In Polish:
>
> 0 pakietów
> 1 pakiet
> 2, 3, 4 pakiety
> 5, 6, ..., 21 pakietów
> 22, 23, 24 pakiety
> etc.
>
> Good luck with l10n.
>
> (I do not want to discourage work on it.  But I'm afraid it's more
> difficult than many people think...  OTOH, if a reasonable
> infrastructure is introduced in Emacs, I might be tempted to provide
> some translations for Polish.)

Hi,

I don't know whether or not I'm supposed to post here, but just thought
that I'd add my two cents as a mostly-user:  I'd rather have all of
Emacs in English.  These are my reasons:

- Some packages will have translations, some won't, and thus some
  messages will be in my language, and some English, which will be
  confusing (and annoying).

- The manuals will have to be translated too.

- It will undermine online discussion, as people will start posting
  (error) messages in their locales, and others will have to decode
  them.  Also, using online documentation will become harder as now one
  will need to translate.

- Emacs probably has way more strings to be translated than most
  applications out there, which will hinder the translations and make it
  more error prone.  Also, the community is not large enough that the
  messages will always be up-to-date and correct.

I believe most users would just use Emacs in English even if the strings
were translated, as many have their LC_MESSAGES or entire OS in English:
It's just more convenient for a power user.  The Emacs community is
mostly anglophone already anyways, and I doubt having translations will
change that at all.  Also, given the size of our community and the
amount of work (translating Emacs is translating a programming language
runtime + a collection of applications), it may result to be too much of
a burden on it.

Nevertheless, if translations happen, I'll try to help with Turkish (my
mother tongue) translations.  And please excuse me if I weren't supposed
to post here as I'm not the most experienced user and have only a bunch
of patches in Emacs.

Best,
        gk.