Re: Why emacs have not native language menu

[Hadron]

Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp> writes:

> On 27 juil. 07, at 04:12, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
>>> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp>
>>> Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:02:33 +0900
>>>
>>>
>>> On 26 juil. 07, at 22:36, Hadron wrote:
>>>
>>>> Jesus, half the Emacs manual is hard enough to understand in
>>>> English! :)
>>>
>>> This is basically why translating is difficult: the original
>>> documentation is poorly written.
>>>
>>> And technical documentation is generally poorly written. (I'm just
>>> trying a silly generalization to balance with other silly
>>> generalizations...)
>>
>> I hope this particular silly generalization doesn't include the Emacs
>> manual, because I think it's actually written quite well, as
>> documentation goes.  At least the attention it gets from the
>> maintainers is significant.
>>
>> If you have examples of poor Emacs documentation to show, please do
>> (and eventually submit them as bug report to bug-gnu-emacs mailing
>> list).
>
> I sincerely think the emacs documentation (manual, elisp reference,
> elist introduction) is verbose. I think the structure is not explicit
> enough. I think they don't provide an easy access to information.
> Basically such manuals could be at least half the size they are. But
> this is obviously not something that can be fixed easily, and is also
> a matter of taste more than anything else. The tutorial is much
> better though.

The "Learning Gnu Emacs" book is excellent.

>
> And I think that is the reason why we've seen so little translation of
> the whole thing, even though emacs has been around for a while
> now. The fact that there is no localization framework also helps: it
> shows that emacs developers were specifically _not_ interested in
> getting involved with reaching out to other linguistic communities.
> It makes it difficult for translators to have their work advertised
> properly (even though there are links to some translations), it makes
> updating the translation a fantastic endeavor.
>
>
>
> Jean-Christophe Helary
>
>
>

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