> Whereas assuming that PHP users are too stupid to understand english is
> not at all arrogant? :)
Wrong, Sterling. Beginning PHP users might neither have
formal education in computer science _nor_ foreign languages.
The reason here is not about intellect; it is about requiring
certain knowledge. Presuming that someone else must speak
your language is quite self-centered.
Alas, if your view was correct (users must understand
English), then we could just scrap the whole translation
effort. I don't think that it's realistic.
> What you're missing is that currently to program PHP, you need a reasonable
> understanding of english.
I don't think so. The translations of the PHP manual do a
fine job at relaying all necessary information about
programming in PHP to speakers of foreign languages.
> Educate users to speak the base amount of english required, I18N'ing the
> language is just going to lead to headaches from a user perspective
> (incorrect translations, slower performance, translations for english speakers)
The performance is negligible -- error messages are displayed
during the development phase, not in a production
environment where run-time behaviour is important.
The "incorrect translations" argument applies to all
translations, regardless where and when they are displayed.
Online translations can be centrally maintained, of course,
which is an advantage. This can be addressed by providing
stand-alone message catalogues which can be downloaded by
administrators.
> and a developer perspective (having to lookup tokens, understanding another
> language, getting bug reports with horrible error messages).
>
> The whole i18n thing can be solved by just listing the translations of
> the error codes on the doc page, let's do that, instead of bloating the
> PHP infrastructure.
Frankly, so far the discussion has been primarily
developer-focused, which is not too surprising. The
developers are rarely exposed to support requests from
newbies in various non-English forums.
If PHP is supposed to become easier to use, then native
language error messages would be a big hit.
- Sascha
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