On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 2:10 AM, Edward Diener<eldiener@tropicsoft.com> wrote:
On 4/18/2011 9:53 AM, Paul A. Bristow wrote:
My personal objection to Gnu gettext and its English bias has nothing to do with any desire myself to use a language other than English in order to communicate, since English ( or perhaps Americanese ) is the language of
country in which I was born, but nearly everything to do with my sense of the problems of translating even computer program phraseology from one language to another without complicating things by having to put some other language, even a very popular one, in the middle.
Was that a single sentence ? I wonder if it can be translated to Japanese ?
These are all valid points Speaking in a particular language means to be thinking in a certain way and many things can be lost in the
From: Edward Diener <eldiener@tropicsoft.com> On 4/19/2011 3:17 AM, Matus Chochlik wrote: the translation.
But I don't see above any solutions to the actual problem.
From how I see it there are several ways to handle this:
1) Stick to English phrases [snip]
Take your pick :-)
My pick is to use what the language currently provides, which is wchar_t, which can represent UTF-16,
No it can not represent UTF-16, it represents either UTF-32 (on most platforms around) or UTF-16 (on one specific platform Microsoft Windows).
a popular Unicode variant which also happens to be the standard for wide characters on Windows, which just happens to be the dominant operating system in the world ( by alot ) in terms of end-users.
That is questionable statement especially that there are so much iPhones, Andriods, Servers and Services not using Windows but directly communicating with end user. But your statement has nothing to do with support of Unicode in C++ world
What I object to is not the way that Locale currently works but that the author of the library seems to have a closed mind about this issue. He thinks that UTF-8 must be the standard because it is what Linux uses,
I bake your pardon? UTF-8 is standard far beyond what Linux is uses. I suggest to study a facts about it a little. Buzzwords: xml, web, Unicode and more and more and more. About UTF-16, I assume you are not familiar with this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1049947/should-utf-16-be-considered-harmf... Despite this Boost.Locale fully supports UTF-16/wchar_t on windows.
and he thinks that everyone must follow the way that gnu gettext does things because that also comes from the Linux world about which he is knowledgable.
Even when it is pointed out to him the flaw in gnu gettext which forces other languages to go through English to be translated, he feels that this is correct on the basis that English is the dominant language in computer programming, so every programmer must know it to write computer programmers in C++.
- How many translation system do you know? - How many have you tested? - How many have you really used? - How many programs have you ever localized, translated? All systems use English as the base as it is the best practice.
[snip] Claiming that all programmers must know English to do programming, or that translating through English is a rote job I also find absurd. [snip]
Despite the fact that it is what is done all over the world very successfully. Artyom