Re: Translations, GNOME and KDE

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

sön 2004-01-04 klockan 18.56 skrev Sayamindu Dasgupta:
> > FWIW, I don't think this should be controversial at all. Coders who
> > don't know English are already in a deep hole, and debug string in a
> > foreign language reported to english-speaking hackers or (worse) into
> > bugzilla are of virtually no use. If it goes to console, it should never
> > be marked for translation (IMHO.)
> 
> Agreed - in fact in case of some languages, messages that are supposed 
> to be displayed on the console are not displayed at all - simply because 
> the console does not support rendering such scripts.

I don't think this should be the main decision factor at all, since:

1) It's a technical limitation of the consoles. We can't change much
about that. Anything that isn't 7-bit clean ASCII ending up on the
console will always cause *some* problem *somewhere* due to all the
legacy terminal stuff hanging around, and we can't use and usually don't
use that as an excuse for not translating console applications and
console output as well as possible.

2) It only affects some locales, not all of them. The output of many
locales can be read perfectly fine on the console.

3) Debug messages and error messages spit out on the console almost
always end up in log files aswell, and log files can be rendered and
read perfectly well in, say gedit or nautilus, as long as rendering of
the script is supported by the desktop in the first place.

4) As a desktop project, we should encourage use of it. See 3) ;-)
I'm not saying that we should require people to read logs through
desktop utilities, but rather I'm saying that we shouldn't use the
technical limitations of the console as an excuse for not doing it when
our own desktop utilities can do the trick. It might be interpreted as
if we're not eating our own dog food.


Christian