Re: babelgnus

[Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
> Whadday'allthink?

I think that the babel service will go away entirely if it's made so
ubiquitously accessible in reading interfaces.

If every non-French, Gnus-using reader of fr.* starts translating
every single article to English (or German, Finnish, or Flemish), it
seems to me that we should reasonably expect that the service will
abruptly disappear, having been neither intended nor designed for that
level of use.

Once Gnus is able to do such a thing, one can only wonder how long
before Netscrape and Internet Exploder plug-ins will become available
to do the same thing.  There is after all a heavy feature-copying
mentality in such stuff.  (Recall why Gnus gained smilification.)

Keeping translation as a manual request for a single article should be
the way to go.  Auto-translating whole hierarchies will just hurt us,
on a social level.  Those reading national hierarchies should in
general be capable in the subject language.