Re: Emacs i18n

[Richard Stallman]

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  > One of the main decisions that has to be made is whether to wrap all
  > user-facing translatable strings in all Lisp files using a macro/function
  > 'gettext' (alias '_') explicitly like is implemented in XEmacs' I18N3
  > that would help to extract translations from the source code, or to use
  > a low-level implicit translation without changing the existing code like
  > is implemented for handling text-quoting-style in format strings.
  > The latter will even allow translation of strings that a package author
  > forgot to mark with '_'.

We could recognize all strings passed as certain arguments to certain
functions as translatable automatically, and have an explicit
way to mark other strings as translatable.  That could reduce
the amount of work for developers to mark them.

The translatability could be recorded as a text property in the
string.  Then, if a function such as 'message' gets a format string
that is not translatable, it could warn, or save up a record that
developers could optionally look at later.  This would help remind
developers to mark the strings that need it.



-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)