GNU gettest manual

[Purodha Blissenbach]

Hi,

I have got a version of the preliminary draft GNU gettext documenation on my 
computer with poedit. It says:

Edition 0.10.35, 1 May 1998

That is 10 years old, wouw.

It publishes an outdated e-mai address which should be updated:
<address@hidden>: host mx10.gnu.org[199.232.76.166] said: 550
*.ai.mit.edu no longer in use. use @gnu.org instead. (in reply to RCPT TO
command)

Few remarks:

 In "Aspects in Native Language Support" it talks of countries a lot. This is 
misguiding, and too imprecise. "Cultures or Regions" would be the better 
term. Beware: Many major languages like Chinese, English, Spanish, 
Arabic,Bengali, Portuguese, Swahili German, Kurdi, Azeri, Dutch are spoken in 
several or even many countries and continents. Some languages are spoken only 
in federal states, provinces, regions, vallies, islands, cities, or even 
villages inside a country. Many countries have many languages, such as India 
(260+), Philipines (~80), South Africa, and so on. Some areas are having 
mixed languages, for instance East Belgium has French, Wallon, German, and 
vernacular, and very many people are fluent using either. While i18n may use 
an open set lof languages, L18n has a complicated set of mixes and 
dependencies on language, culture, and the like.

 One thing hardly taken care of is that peoples multilinguality varies. 
Setting a computer to use, say, russian, is by far insufficient. In fact, one 
would need to tell on a per user basis, which language / locale to use, and a 
series of fallbacks, to be used in such cases, where all more perferred L18ns 
are unavaliable, This thinking needs to be reflected in each program, or at 
least the libraries it is using. All GUI program should allow interactive and 
instant switching between languages and locales, so as to aid people who are 
not sure to have understood something right in one language or with one 
locale, and to support changing users at the screen without having to reboot.

 It is fairly insufficient, only to translate strings. Parameter insertion is 
needed, parameter typing is needed, case switching is needed (for instance on 
various  grammatical forms, numbers, genders, addressing modes and 
politeness, to name only a few) and programs, programmers, screen designers 
and layouters need to be aware of the flexibility required by the outcomes.

Hints:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/I18n
http://cldr.unicode.org/

Greetings - Purodha Blissenbach, <address@hidden>