Re: Why emacs have not native language menu

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

On 27 juil. 07, at 04:12, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > From: Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp>
> > Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:02:33 +0900
> >
> >
> > On 26 juil. 07, at 22:36, Hadron wrote:
> >
> > > Jesus, half the Emacs manual is hard enough to understand in
> > > English! :)
> >
> > This is basically why translating is difficult: the original
> > documentation is poorly written.
> >
> > And technical documentation is generally poorly written. (I'm just
> > trying a silly generalization to balance with other silly
> > generalizations...)
>
> I hope this particular silly generalization doesn't include the Emacs
> manual, because I think it's actually written quite well, as
> documentation goes.  At least the attention it gets from the
> maintainers is significant.
>
> If you have examples of poor Emacs documentation to show, please do
> (and eventually submit them as bug report to bug-gnu-emacs mailing
> list).

I sincerely think the emacs documentation (manual, elisp reference,  
elist introduction) is verbose. I think the structure is not explicit  
enough. I think they don't provide an easy access to information.  
Basically such manuals could be at least half the size they are. But  
this is obviously not something that can be fixed easily, and is also  
a matter of taste more than anything else. The tutorial is much  
better though.

And I think that is the reason why we've seen so little translation  
of the whole thing, even though emacs has been around for a while  
now. The fact that there is no localization framework also helps: it  
shows that emacs developers were specifically _not_ interested in  
getting involved with reaching out to other linguistic communities.  
It makes it difficult for translators to have their work advertised  
properly (even though there are links to some translations), it makes  
updating the translation a fantastic endeavor.



Jean-Christophe Helary