Re: Internationalization

[visigoth@naiad.fac.cs.cmu.edu]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no> writes:

> If such a thing was to be done, how should one do it?  Has there been
> done work in this area for other Elisp packages?
> 
> Hm...  One could create mappings from the English prompts and messages
> to the current countries' prompts and messages, using a hash table.
> Providing that the different messages are unique in English.  Then one
> just has to wrap all string in the source code with `(gnus-map "The
> string")', and the `gnus-map' function could use a hash table built
> from the tranlation file for the country during loadup...  Hm...  How
> should the translations be specified in the translation files?  Uhm,
> that could be done easily enough, with just about any syntax, with the
> English originals as comments.  The skeleton translation file(s) could
> be generated automatically by just looking for the `gnus-map' calls in
> the source files...

This sounds like an interesting way to start--I suspect that it would
be useful after a time to move the English version out to a file as
well.  So you would have something like:

(in gnus-art.el, lines around 386:)

	(format prompt (if (and gnus-number-of-articles-to-be-saved
                                (> gnus number-of-articles-to-be-saved 1))
                           (format (gnus-get-trans 'these-articles)
                                   gnus-number-of-articles-to-be-saved)
                        (gnus-get-trans 'this-article)))

On the other hand--that's really damned ugly.  Hmm.  It would be nice
if there were some better guarantee that things still work even when a
string changes, that would be good.  Maybe use a combination of these
two strategies.

(gnus-map "these %d articles" 'these-articles)

So this would use "these %d articles" if the language was set to use
the default strings, or look it up from the translation list using the
symbol.  This way, if the string changes, the symbol can stay the
same.  If it changes drastically, it's perhaps easier to recall that
it needs to be changed elsewhere, too.

And finally, you could also do something like:

gnus-text-these-D-articles => "these %d articles" or the
translation--and have a loaded file which sets up the mappings.  I
suppose this just wastes a lot of namespace, though.

The real problem is that anything that's easy to convert to from
having the quotes in-line has the consistency problem--and any other
method sort of uglifies things.  <frown>

And the real problem, unfortunately, is documentation strings.

John.