Re: Proposal for declinations in gettext

[martin v loewis de (Martin v. =?iso-8859-15?q?L=F6wis?=)]

Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org> writes:

> I've already thought of this issue several times (about declinations
> and plurals), and the approach that seems the most promising to me is
> the one used by the UNL (Universal Networking Language)[1].

I'm not at all convinced that using English for msgids is
insufficient.  It is quite convenient for most developers, which is an
important aspect.  In some cases, programs using English don't support
i18n very well. In these cases, authors of the program must be
educated, and changes to the program must be developed. In my
experience, this is only a small fraction of the programs, and
usually, only the first translator runs into the problems - later
translators will find the msgids in good shape.

With any other approach *everybody* would need to relearn things,
which is not feasible.

Regards,
Martin