----- Original Message ----
From: Ryou Ezoe <boostcpp@gmail.com> To: boost@lists.boost.org Sent: Fri, April 15, 2011 12:59:03 AM Subject: Re: [boost] Fw: [locale] Formal review of Boost.Locale library
Here is a sad fact. It's so hard to find a Japanese programmer who also knows English. Believe me, there are many Japanese boost users. But they don't contribute in here because they don't know English one bit. Requiring English means this library will be never used by Japanese.
I really don't like the current situation too. But it cannot be changed.
I'll try to explain more about the ASCII requirements. One important feature of the catalogs is that if the translation string does not exists in the catalog the original one is shown. This allows translating the software part-by-part and more then that it allows to do it independently of its development. In real world there is a very few software that has 100% of messages translated so such fallback is very important. Indeed you see once in a while an untranslated message in English in most software. But as English is in generally international language most users tolerate it in certain level. What would happen if the message that is accidentally shown is in Japanese and a used have no chance to find what does it mean at all. All literate uses know English at least on some basic level and probably would be able to google for this text... Japanese.. No way! That it is why the original strings should be kept in English. The second reason is a performance. What is the encoding of the source string? Latin1, ASCII, UTF-8, Shift-JIS? Even if it is known and widely used UTF-8 you would have to do charset conversion while with ASCII you just cast. As it is (almost) universal subset of all encodings. So there are plenty good reasons to do this. And if you have troubles with programmers to know English let them write in poor English and then ask copyrighter to review their strings. And if they really struggle use Romaji. Believe me you have more troubles handling source files encoding correctly.
Please, Don't start plural handling system. It's bad for localization. Plural should not be handled by software which will be localized to all known languages. You can use.
I have 2 shirt(s).
I'm sorry but almost all but East-Asian languages have plural forms. You have no idea how silly it sounds in Russian to miss it. So no. It is very important part and "I have 2 shirt(s)" is bad localization. Artyom