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[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2022 Jean-Christophe Helary"]]
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# Pre-localizing Emacs
Jean-Christophe Helary (he/him)
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Before Emacs user-facing strings are localized to users’ languages (will that ever happen?), there are things developers must remember when including such strings in the code, and there are things that emacs-lisp beginners (like me, forever) can do to help when they face such issues.
It is not easy to write naturally flowing language when the language depends on program variables, but even if we stick to English for the time being, it is important to separate natural language from computer language as much as possible.
I will be presenting an old patch to packages.el accepted in June 2018 that took me about a year to write. The origin of the patch is a plural mistake in the packages install messages. As you can see pre-patch, the code was filled with English substrings embedded into the code to produce pasts, plurals and all sorts of English grammatical constructs.
<https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=61f73703c74756e6963cc622f03bcc6938ab71b2>
Even if it is a beginner’s patch (thoroughly reviewed by dev-experts), it shows what can be done by emacs-lisp beginners to help with “straightening” the strings to reduce the number of potential English bugs and then to make Emacs strings easier to be handled by real localization processes, one day.
# Discussion
## Questions and answers
- Q: I use Emacs on English but my mother tongue is Spanish. Is Emacs
localized/localizable?
- haha I have no English knowledge to help fixing text labels, but
it is of use for new developments.
- A:
- Q: You mention regex on strings is a red flag for localization, are
there others to look out for?
- A:
- Q: So, your project is to localize all of Emacs?
- A:
- Q: How deep would usefull localization go? Because at the core of
emacs are Docstrings and localizing them could also imply localizing
Elisp.
- A:
Other feedback:
- Merci Jean-Christophe ! I really enjoyed your talk (and would very much like to help localise Emacs).
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