Re: [Caml-list] error messages in multiple languages ?

[Adrien Nader <adrien@notk.org>]

On Mon, Apr 10, 2017, Tao Stein wrote:
> I'm not sure one would have to be able to read all the languages for there
> to be some win. There may be some similarity between subsets of the
> languages -- within the Latin languages, Traditional and Simplified
> Chinese, for example. If I were putting in Traditional Chinese messages,
> I'd want them to be consistent with the Simplified Chinese messages, and I
> need not be able to read Spanish. Anyways, I'm not convinced this is a big
> win. Maybe just something to think about. Any thoughts on using UTF-8 for
> the file(s)?
> 
> And thoughts on the other points?

Just think about the fact that some languages such as Polish have
several plurals (*) yet can be understood a bit by French speakers.
There are reasons translations need to be done by people knowledgeable
about both languages involved in a translation.

It is also worth pointing out that gettext's update-po task gives
statistics about the translations: number of translated strings, number
of untranslated strings, number of "fuzzy" translations (and maybe
others). It also seems to be able to perform some simple updates
automatically (was quite astonished to find out about this). The
workflow itself is really simple and usually amounts to "make
update-po", edit po/$LANG.po, update the translation which are marked
"fuzzy" and remove that keyword when you're done.

Without saying anything about the likelihood of such a change being
integrated, linking against libgettext would have to be optional and
note that there's also ocaml-gettext to take a look at. There are also
many many places that would need changes so any evolution would need
some plan and would also probably need to be done in steps.

(*) hopefully I didn't get that one wrong :P 

-- 
Adrien Nader