Re: @dircategory (Re: Translating Emacs manuals is of strategic importance)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Daniel Cerqueira <dan.list@brilhante.top>
> Cc: Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr>,
>   jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org,  stefankangas@gmail.com,
>   vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr,  emacs-devel@gnu.org,  rms@gnu.org,
>   help-texinfo@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2024 12:48:46 +0000
> 
> > The translator doesn't always know whether a translated manual exists
> > when the translation is being written.  And even if a translated
> > manual does exist, there's no reason to be sure it will be installed
> > on the end-user's system.
> >
> > So it would be good to have some Texinfo feature that would make the
> > behavior of Info readers more user-friendly in these cases.  Right
> > now, the Texinfo features that can help are @documentlanguage and the
> > suggestion by Gavin to have in the translated manual an @anchor for
> > each @node with the original English name of that @node.
> >
> How come the translator doesn't always know whether a translated manual
> exists?
> 
> That is ridiculous.
> 
> It is the same as saying that a translator just translated a whole
> manual, without checking, and it was already translated. Ludacris.

This is a misunderstanding: I was talking about a manual other than
the one which is being translated by a translator.  A translator who
works on translating, say, the Emacs manual doesn't necessarily know
whether another manual, say, for Coreutils, to which the Emacs manual
has a cross-reference, has been translated to the same language, nor
whether such a translation of Coreutils will be installed on the
system where a user will read the translated Emacs manual.

> Sub-optimal? Like translators are deficient?

Granted, nothing like that was intended.  Sorry if what I wrote could
be even remotely hinting on something like that.

"Sub-optimal" in the sense that there will be situations where
clicking a cross-reference will show an error message instead of
taking me to another manual that I could read.

> (I am the translator of GnuPG and Git).

What do you do if you need to translate a cross reference from the
GnuPG manual to the Emacs manual?  Do you translate the node name to
which the cross-reference points?  If so, how do you know what is the
translation of that node's name in the Emacs manual?

> I wholeheartedly disagree with Eli. In here I am nobody, but still I
> don't like this complexity being added to a tool that I use to make
> my books (texinfo).

So you prefer that the Info reader shows an error message when the
user clicks a cross reference to another manual, and the translation
of that manual is not installed on the user's system, even if the
English version of that manual _is_ installed?  That's what I meant by
"sub-optimal".

I didn't suggest any solution, let alone a complex one.  I just said
that I think such a solution should exist.