Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 16:51:13 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: alex@big.endian.de (Alexander Langer) Cc: bp@butya.kz (Boris Popov), dima@Chg.RU (Dmitry S. Sivachenko), freebsd-i18n@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: gettext Message-ID: <200006251651.JAA07637@usr02.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <20000624183906.B2843@cichlids.cichlids.com> from "Alexander Langer" at Jun 24, 2000 06:39:06 PM
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> > This is not correct. Not everybody knows English well, these are > > mostly newbies and having translated docs and program messages is a real > > help for them. > > Yes. But while I prefer German menus in GUI-programs, for example, I > really dislike, that the same LANG var affects those stuff. > > Imagine a bug-report: How do _you_ want to understand an error message > in German?? I have to agree with this. One of the biggest mistakes that Whistle made was to translate log messages from various programs. When people request support, it is nearly impossible to support them based on the log file contents. I can read most Spanish, German, French, Italian, Latin, some Greek, some Swahili, some Russian, etc., but unless it's in Kana, I can't read Japanese at all. Guess where the most non-English support situations occur? IBMs AIX was given as an example; AIX always has an error message number associated with error messages. At the very least, you can look up the number in an English message catalog, and see what is happening that way. One thing that we've adopted at Whistle is to use a machine-readable logging format. Not all code uses this, but for the code that does, one can tell the internal state of any automaton or other program just by looking at the log files. Ideally, we will eventually modify syslogd to maintain state information as messages get logged. Obviously, it's possible to translate machine readable logs on viewing, rather than in the log files themselves. And that's what you really want to have happen. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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