On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 08:33:02PM -0800, Edward Cherlin wrote: > On Friday 28 March 2003 01:21 pm, Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote: > > > I agree with Kubota-san and Peter, Internationalization should > > be inherent in all programs, and even American programmers > > should be able to easily write internationalized programs. > > > > One idea I have had was that strings in programming languages > > should automatically be put for translation, unless it is a > > constant. > > > > Is that a scheme that would work? > > Not in that simplistic form. Programmers frequently compose > messages from pieces that fit together in the language and > context they are most familiar with, but not in others. > Variations in the way languages deal with gender, number, > declensions, conjugations, sentence order, polite speech, and > other factors interfere.
Of cause there needs to be some explicit i18n functionality adressing this, but that is probably a level that we cannot make i18n-naïve programmers learn easily. My idea was that strings in programs automatically were internationalized and there were readily available tools like .po-files available for localization. That would satisfy some part of Kubota-sans goal. What would be lost in this? This would also lead to cleaner programming, removing some of the i18n overhead in the syntax, like explicit calls of the gettext macro. One could then have a macro to mark a text *not* for translation. > The classic Chomskian example of sentences with the same word > order but different structure is the two sentences > Time flies like an arrow. > Fruit flies like a banana. > > In English one can say, "Is it here?" or "Is he here?" However, > in Japanese those ideas are expressed with distinct verbs, "aru" > for the inanimate and "iru" for the animate. > > My favorite example is the Japanese utterance, "Boku wa, ebi da." > After the first few months of studying Japanese, an American > would attempt to translate this as, "I am a shrimp." Actually, > when spoken to a waiter, it means, "Mine is the shrimp dish." Yes, there are examples like this, but they are not frequent in Open Source translations. I have personally been thru hundred of thousands of translations (for Danish) and from my memory the problem of ambiguity occurs in less than 1 % of the strings for that language. But of cause there should be tools to address the issue, and in my mind that should be built into the programming language. My idea was to address this first for the programming languages C and C++. Comments? > > Could we just do some automated tools to mark every string for > > translation via gettext - or would it need further spec, like > > getting it thru some standards process? > > No, we actually need to teach them how to do it right. The > details are application-specific. Yes, we could also provide tutorials, but I fear that many programmers would not take the trouble to read it and follow them. On the other hand almost all applications I use today under Linux are internationalizaed and loclalized for my language. Are there any good tutorials out there for how to do i18n programmimng? Best regards keld -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
