On 4/17/2011 1:38 PM, Peter Dimov wrote:
Edward Diener wrote:
The fact that translation always begin from English ( or perhaps some other narrow character language ) to something else is horrendous.
I wouldn't agree. In practice, this is a reasonable way to do it. It may not be ideal for Japan, but it isn't horrendous, either.
It is horrendous to me because of it is illogical and nobody appears to have recognize that.
I do understand that translation is just one part of this large library, but I hope that the implementer undestands how ridiculous it is to assume that non-English programmers are going to be willing to translate from English to language X rather than from their own language to language X.
As a practical matter, the typical way to localize an application written is language Y is to translate it to English first, then to the target languages X1..Xn. Finding translators from English to Xi is much easier and more affordable than finding translators from Y to Xi for almost all values of Y. If non-English programmers can't produce the English messages directly, the alternative is to use unique tokens; instead of the text "Hello World" they can use "initial_greeting" (possibly in a phonetic representation of their language, but programmers usually can handle English at such a basic level - grammar and spelling are optional here).
(I, personally, always use the latter approach instead of leaving English text in the code, but both approaches are workable.)
Things often becomes "practical" when there is no better available solution or few better solutions which are accessible and usable. But practicality to me does not mean correctness. I am arguing for correctness, which in this case means to me the ability to 'translate' from one encoding to another encoding. I do not think you can seriously argue that 'translation' from language X to language Y is more correct if it must go from language X to language E to language Y.