Re: Summary (Re: A system for localizing documentation strings)

[Jason Rumney]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> I'd say that it would be much more straightforward to use an elisp
> system to do that than to externalize the tasks to gettext.

I wouldn't completely dismiss using gettext in Emacs. There are several
sources of strings that should be translated in Emacs. Some of these
(documentation, menu names, tooltips) we can already reliably identify
and extract for translation without changing anything in the code, so it
doesn't make sense to change our code to fit in with gettext 's way of
doing things for these. But there are many other strings that get
displayed to the user (prompts and messages in the minibuffer), where an
automated process cannot reliably decide whether or not they should be
translated without human intervention. In these cases we will have to
mark them somehow, so we might as well use existing methods such as
those used by gettext (which does already specify a convention for
elispas well as C).