Re: Internationalization

[pinard@progiciels-bpi.ca (François Pinard)]

Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:

| Ulrich Drepper <drepper@myware.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> writes:
| 
| > You original mail claimed that for using the
| > internationalization features you need to understand that language.
| 
| No it did not.  I was saying that the i18n support in GNU should not
| be fair, so the code should read gettext ("hello") and not gettext
| ("bonjour") even if the original author is French.  This way, you only
| need to learn one foreign language (English), not two (English and
| French) to contribute to or maintain the program.

People *may* really do it the way they want, it will work anyway.  If I
want to write a software in French localisable in English, that's my sole
and own choice.

However, within GNU at least, partly for the reasons you give, the
original untranslated strings, as well as programmers' comments, have
to be in English.  I agree with you that this increases the overall
freedom of the program, since contributions are planetary, nowadays.
Yet checking, this constraint is not written in full in GNU standards
(an omission most probably, I'll check).

-- 
François Pinard         ``Vivement GNU!''        pinard@iro.umontreal.ca
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