On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 09:40:32AM +0900, Atsuhito Kohda wrote: > I would not do such efforts and do not care so much if his mind > could not be changed but I would like to know any opinion to my > proposal. > > He adds points to menu capability but I believe that a really useful > menu system needs, at least, i18n of a window manger. > > Any comments or advices? In your earlier mail you said: > WindowMaker, which I use almost everytime, is internationalized > so we can see "Japanese menu" and "Japanese text on netscape title" > and so on. But with afterstep, which is not internationalized, > Japanese menu shows us messages something like messages from an alien > so, in the worst case, we can not find out the menu to quit/exit > window manager! > > I am not sure but asclassic, a rather old version of afterstep, > is internationalized already but fvwm* are not internationalized yet > (but Debian JP provides japanization of them and try to merge now). > > KDE (may be not a window manager) is not internationalized but > gnome (enlightenment?) is perhaps internationalized. > > Sorry but I do not know about locale. But, at least, I18N is necessary > if locale would do something good, isn't it? Again, it seems to me that you're talking about localization, not internationalization. Let me give you an example since we seem to be talking past each other on this point: EXAMPLE 1: #!/bin/sh # Program to print the phrase "thank you" # not internationalized echo "Thank you." exit EXAMPLE 2: #!/bin/sh # An internationalized program to print the phrase "thank you". # Not localized for Spanish. # A truly well-internationalized program would not handle things this way. # (There are LC_* variables to worry about, etc.) case "$LANG" in: en_US*) echo "Thank you." ;; en_CA*) echo "Thanks, eh? Let's have a beer and subsidize professional hockey." en_GB*) echo "Most kind. I couldn't possibly--" ;; de_DE*) echo "Danke schön. Kommen Sie bitte mit der Polizei." ;; fr_FR*) echo "Merci. Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time." ;; default) echo "Thank you. [no message for $LANG]" ;; esac exit (Coming up with an expression to satirize Americans is left as an exercise to the reader.) See what I mean? Just because a program has been internationalized, and thus is ABLE to support various localizations, doesn't mean it has been localized. Pretend that example 2 is somehow a window manager. It's well and good for English, French, and German speakers, but it does no good to promote that program as being favored generally, especially for a Spanish user. The program does not address Spanish localization, so it isn't any better for a Spanish-speaker than an uninternationalized English program. -- G. Branden Robinson | The greatest productive force is human Debian GNU/Linux | selfishness. branden@ecn.purdue.edu | -- Robert Heinlein roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |
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