Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ce1d38: Use curved quotes in core elisp diagnostics

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Wolfgang Jenkner <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 15:37:10 +0200
> Cc: Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> 
> On Tue, Aug 18 2015, Paul Eggert wrote:
> 
> > If it helps, I think
> > diagnostics are the last major component of getting Emacs quoting to
> > follow common modern practice (controlled by user preference of
> > course).
> 
> I'd think that "common modern practice" for GNU projects is described in
> (info "(gettext) po/LINGUAS").
> 
> IIUC, the description there recommends that the usual "ugly" quotes
> should be used in source files and translated at run time according to
> the locale.

That description is for messages in locale-specific languages.  If
someone wants to work on infrastructure for translating Emacs messages
to other languages, then they should include in that infrastructure
facilities for converting the quotes to locale-specific conventions
(or maybe rely on the translators to replace the quotes as part of the
translated messages, as gettext-based projects do).

But as long as Emacs speaks to the users only in US English, it is IMO
wrong to replace the quotes by locale-specific ones, exactly for the
same reason it is wrong to sort multi-lingual text in a buffer using
locale-specific sorting rules: those locale-specific rules were
invented for sorting the locale's language(s), not for sorting
multi-lingual text.  E.g., it would be very weird for me to see a
message quoting, say, Chinese text with German-style quotes just
because I happen to be in the de_DE locale!