Hi,

This is an interesting question and the issue was discussed in 2012 on the list:

https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2012-11/msg00100.html

Currently there is no mechanism in the compiler codebase to have multi-language strings in the compiler. Alexis Irland proposed a patch in the above thread ( https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2012-11/msg00152.html ) that certainly enabled some kind of parametrization, but unfortunately the patch files (which were hosted on a personal dropbox) seem lost today. (What I have at hand is a French translation of the compiler messages made by Jacques-Henri Jourdan, but without a parametrization mechanism.)

I think that this is an interesting idea and I would personally be willing to support a well-engineered patch providing the feature (the question of whether the internationalized messages should be hardcoded in a source file or use a sort of gettext-like mechanism is delicate), but I don't know the opinion of the compiler maintainers.

On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 10:22 AM, Tao Stein <taostein@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been teaching OCaml to university students in Beijing. I believe they'd feel more comfortable if the error messages were in Chinese. Has anyone thought of implementing multi-language strings in the compiler? So, say with the setting of an environment variable, the compiler user could receive errors and warnings in their preferred language. I know it would require a lot of translation work (crowd sourced?), but the internal language abstraction mechanism would need to be there too.

Tao Stein / 石涛 / تاو شتاين