Re: Translating Emacs manuals is of strategic importance

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jan 5, 2024, at 21:53, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>> Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2024 02:36:29 +0000
>> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org>
>> Cc: Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, Vincent 
>> Belaïche <vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr>, emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org
>> 
>> We have little translations and translators on the horizons not because
>> they do not potentially exist, but because Emacs was always seen as a
>> closed English-only system.
>> 
>> Emacs is *the* free software movement flagship. There is no equivalent
>> in the history of the movement. Still, it is the one that has
>> historically shown the least interest in, or practical commitment to,
>> translation and localization.
> 
> This is at least inaccurate, and quite a bit unfair, I must say.  The
> fact that Emacs does not yet support localized translated messages is
> correct, of course, but explaining that by lack of interest and
> practical commitment is not.  I think even the response of the
> maintainers to Vincent's submission speaks volumes about the level of
> our interest and commitment.

The proof is in the pudding. In 40 years, the Emacs project has yet to 
publish an up-to-date manual in a non-English language.

It’s a fact. And I understand that it comes from the community at large 
not being interested in that aspect of Emacs.

But there are groups that worked on a Japanese manual if my memory is 
correct. There is mention of a Chinese manual, I know of the French 
attempt at working on the manuals 20 years ago, and there are probably 
many other language groups that tried too.

Where the people too shy to ask if their work could be included? Maybe. 
Was the “English is the language of computer development” general 
stance detrimental to considering these efforts as valuable then? I’d 
think that yes.

I’m glad that you are strongly stating that Emacs as a project does not 
support that view.

> Silly things people sometimes say here aside (and everyone who reads
> this list should be able to distinguish between wrong or even silly
> opinions of some and the official POV of the Emacs maintainers), the
> projects that have translations all do it using gettext and the
> related infrastructure.  All they need is to wrap strings in the
> various printf's with _(), and the rest is a matter of having a
> message catalog translated to the target language.  So it is quite
> simple for those programs to provide localized messages.

We are really talking manuals here. Not message strings.

man pages are translated. Web pages are translated. DocBook or other 
documentation is translated. Etc. There are millions of words in 
various documentation formats that are translated to dozens of 
languages in the free software world.

> So before you accuse the project as a whole in being "passively
> dismissive" wrt translations, a reality check is in order.  The real
> reasons are not the lack of interest or us being lazy.

I certainly never suggested that “you” (for any value of “you”) were 
being lazy.

>> I’m really glad that Vincent’s commit has actually started to stir the
>> pot, because the mere fact that we did not have a location within the
>> Emacs sources to put our translations was probably one of the major
>> show stoppers for all translation endeavours.
> 
> Nothing is farther from the truth.  There was no need to "stir the
> pot": as soon as Vincent came up with his translation, he was
> immediately asked whether adding that to Emacs would be possible.
> That alone should speak volumes of the attitude of the current (and
> past) maintainers wrt making Emacs friendlier to people whose first
> language is not English.

Maybe stirring the pot was not the appropriate expression and I am not 
criticizing maintainers at all. What is happening now is a very 
constructive discussion on how to move forward regarding translations. 

That has never happened in the past (as far as I remember, and checked 
in the archives), and I think that it is thanks to Vincent moving 
forward and committing his manual to a place that did not exist 
before.

> It is unreasonable
> to expect the Emacs project to solve problems that are common to all
> the GNU projects, and accuse us of lack of interest because those
> problems are not yet solved satisfactorily.

I’m not sure where that comes from. I’m trying to focus on Emacs 
manuals. You’re the one who mentioned that TexInfo should be involved.

But I’m not sure it is fair to expect translators to wait until 
somebody comes up with a “globally satisfactory solution to problems 
common to all the GNU projects”, whatever that means in practice.

> See above: the existing communities don't need to solve the problems
> that are central to Emacs in this area, they don't even come close.

I’m still not sure how documentation translation is so much harder to 
handle for Emacs than for other projects. Texi is just another plain text 
format that has nothing special to it.

> So, while PO is definitely one alternative we should consider, it is
> not necessarily the right one for our purposes, certainly when
> translation of large and frequently-changing manuals is concerned.

There are 2 intermediate formats in the industry and they work very 
well for any kind of documentation. It’s PO and XLIFF (side note: there 
is absolutely no technical need to use intermediate formats in 
translation.)

Maybe PO was not designed for documentation in the first place, but 
nothing keeps it from being used that way, and the fact is that it is 
being used that way.

I understand that you don’t think PO is a good solution because you 
want to do the translation in Emacs and translating PO in Emacs is not 
a good experience.

It’s OK if the Emacs project does not create infrastructure that offers 
PO as the intermediate translation format. Texi is a fine format and 
experienced translation teams know how to handle updates, even without 
IDs attached to paragraphs.