Re: Translations, GNOME, and KDE

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Luis and sdg (respectively) said:

> > 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.
> -sdg-
>  
"Don't translate console messages" may hold true in a number of cases 
but I really don't agree with the blanket statement.  It presumes that 
"users" never open a terminal or console.  Or that all console-users 
(whether we classify them as "end users" or 7337) prefer English.  
Faulty logic.

Messages that are "not useful to end users" shouldn't be translated - 
but should they be sent to the console at all?  Kind of begs the 
question.  So one could also logically argue that all console output 
should be marked for translation (or not exist at all).

The fact that some consoles aren't fully i18n-capable doesn't seem like 
a reason not to try.

- Bill