Date: Wed, 18 Jan 95 10:57:40 -0800 From: Bakul Shah <bakul@netcom.com> To: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Internationalization (was Re: CVS stuff) Message-ID: <199501181857.KAA24197@netcom5.netcom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 18 Jan 95 10:33:05 MST." <9501181733.AA02235@cs.weber.edu>
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I can't resist sticking my oar in. FYI, I am not a native English speaker and at present in our household we speak six languages so I would dearly love to see internationalization support. However, having system messages reported in other languages is not high on my list at this time. In fact, I prefer to have messages in english that can be understood by people who are likely to help (and who are very likely to know English). I'd rather see support for *inputting* and *displaying* other languages first. Other than `sam' there is hardly anything else in the free Unix world that can be used to this purpose. You wouldn't believe the contortions one has to go through to typeset something in, e.g., Hindi using TeX. IMHO, for internationalization, the highest priority task is Unicode integration. That is a huge enough task without worrying about message catalogs. You speak of English bias of mailing lists and Usenet but the English bias of Unix etc. is much more pervasive. How would one translate `cat', `sh', `uucp' etc. to other languages? Without English language background these words make _no_ sense. But it would be equally nonsensical to translate them using some high faluting or cute or made up words. I tell you, English is the `C' of natural languages. Bakul
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