RE: Changing the language of gnus menu entries

[Drew Adams]

> >> Perhaps. But I was thinking of people who understand enough English to
> >> get through e.g., the tutorial with some effort, who'd prefer a
> >> translation in their own language and are then put off by the Google
> >> Translate translation. It creates a bad first impression, which might
> >> rub off on Emacs as a whole.
> >
> > That's not the use case I'm talking about.  Such a person would not try
> > an on-the-fly Google translation.  Circulez, il n'y a rien a voir.
> 
> Ok, then perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you have in mind. I thought
> you wanted to automatically provide a Google translation of Emacs help
> texts if no human-made translation exists. 

No.  Provide a command that lets users (on demand) send the current Info
node (or whatever buffer text, including, e.g., just the active region)
to a web-based (or other program) translation service and recuperate the
translated text in another buffer.

For an Info node, it would be great if additionally we could put the
resulting text in Info mode, complete with working xrefs etc.  But that
is something additional, which would not be free from extra work.

[If we had not recently removed `Info-edit' from Info (deprecated it)
then we might even have allowed users to easily replace an English node
with a translated equivalent node (however translated).]

> That way, someone wanting to
> try out Emacs and installing it on a machine with say a German locale
> would get a Google-translated tutorial if they pressed `C-h t'. 

No, only if they explicitly asked for a translation - that was the idea.

(Of course, someone might configure things to always automatically give
them a translation. But even in that case I would propose that this be
provided in a separate buffer.)

> As an extra option, one that is not provided automatically but only at
> the user's request, and clearly indicated as being a machine
> translation, that's a different thing.

Yes, that's what I had in mind.  And text-translator.el seems to come
close already to what I was thinking of.

> > Consider too the possibility that you might find it better because you
> > are better at German than English?
> 
> I'm not sure how that would allow me to understand the English
> translation better than the German one...

My thought was that you might not be as sensitive to English problems as
some might be for whom English is their first language.  Even if that were
not so, you might be more sensitive to German that is not perfect than to
English that is not perfect.

But I was mistakenly thinking that German was your first language.  I guess
Dutch was your first language.  Anyway, in The Netherlands you pretty much
have multiple "first" languages. ;-)  That is, you are often very good at
several languages.