Re: English for msgids

[Bruno Haible]

Robert Clausecker wrote:
> > in 2001, it was a sensible restriction because
> >   - It makes sense to go through English as the pivot language (rather than,
> >     say, Latin or Esperanto), i.e. provide all msgids in English. Even if
> >     the author of the program is German or Chinese. This is because English
> >     is the language for which one can find the most translators.
> >   - English can be mostly written with US-ASCII only.
> >   - There is much less charset-conversion complexity in the runtime and in 
> > the
> >     tools if we can assume that the msgid is US-ASCII only.
> > 
> > It would have been possible to design the gettext() function in such a way 
> > that
> > it does charset conversion on the msgid when no translation is found. But it
> > wasn't designed this way.
> 
> There's lots of reasons not to use English for msgids:
> 
>  - the developer base may not mainly be English speaking and may have trouble
>    coming up with grammatically correct English msgids

True. I've seen one or two programs from Japanese developers having these 
problem.
IMO, they could have their msgids revisited by a translator for 
Japanese/English.

>  - a program that was originally written with messages in another language is
>    internationalised by insertion of gettext() in the appropriate places

That's what I did initially in GNU clisp. But then realized that I wouldn't get
translators e.g. for Russian this way, and so I switched this package to English
as the primary language.

>  - English has very sparse grammar and is almost isolating.  It often happens
>    that an English msgid is translated in a contextually incorrect manner as 
> the
>    target language distinguishes some grammatical features that English does 
> not.

True. As a mitigation, GNU gettext offers the so-called "translator comments" in
the source code. And we publish the email addresses of the translation teams, so
that users can report translation bugs.

Do you know other / alternative mitigations? Feel free to explain them.

Bruno