[Monotone-devel] legacy I18N and tickers (was Re: 0.26 status update)

[Graydon Hoare]

Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:

> lapo> BTW: That's a good idea, up to now I was translating in/out
> lapo> (ingresso/uscita in italian) as "ing."/"usc." but that is very ugly,
> lapo> arrows are much nicer =)
>
> Well, except it breaks under some circumstances...

Agreed. There are really a couple unfortunate behaviors colluding here:

1. We consider "multiple tickers with same name" a fatal error, which it 
probably isn't. We can probably cook up a fallback behavior which is not 
too bad.

2. The French translation contains characters which can't be encoded as 
8859-1. I think this should probably be avoided. It will help 
compatibility in general if people doing translations in locales with 
strong legacy character sets restrict their translations to those 
character sets (even if using the Unicode codepoints and UTF-8 
encoding). If your locale has a lot of ISO-8859, ISO-2022, KOI, KS-C, 
JIS-X, EUC, or GB users kicking around, it's probably best to stick to 
Unicode characters drawn from those sets.

Maybe we will need to add a chapter for translators, covering such picky 
details, to the not-yet-written "hacking monotone" guide. In the 
meantime please don't use the up and down arrows; if you're convinced 
you want non-word symbols, + - will do in a pinch, or /\ \/, or > < 
(assuming your locale fixes a mental model of LTR or RTL writing).

Alternatively, try wandering through a thesaurus looking for "evocative" 
words. They don't need to be precise translations. Consider:

  send / receive
  push / pull
  give / take
  gain / lose
  profit / loss
  up / down
  speak / hear
  produce / consume

-graydon