Re: Summary (Re: A system for localizing documentation strings)

[Stefan Monnier]

> This 4th requirement is a very valid one, but the implementation proposals
> (keep English there) seem to not be practical in the end.

I don't see any technical reason to impose English.  AFAICT, what we'd have
is that the text in the elisp file is "the text by default" (could be in
French, English, Klingon, or even just a UUID).  Then when displaying that
text, if the *.mo file contains a translation for that message, display that
translation, otherwise display the default.

So the French .mo wouldn't contain translations for that messages whose
default is already in French, and same thing for the English, Klingon,
UUID, ... "languages".

Of course, the docstrings within the Emacs distribution would most likely
all be English, but authors of third party packages could use any language
they like, just as they can do now.

Isn't that how gettext works already anyway?  What's new here?


        Stefan