Re: [boost] Fw: [locale] Formal review of Boost.Locale library

Subject: Re: [boost] Fw: [locale] Formal review of Boost.Locale library
From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-04-14 23:44:05

On 4/14/2011 5:14 PM, Artyom wrote:
>>> Because the  sources are in UTF-8 ;-) and it is "Hello World" in Hebrew
>
>> It can be UTF-16  as wel.
>> It's just other encoding can't represents hebrew  characters.
>>
>>> (with vowel marks)
>>>
>>> :-)
>>>
>>>   The best is just to use UTF-8 (source code) anywhere - MSVC handles it
>>>   just fine...
>> I agree with that part.
>>
>> But the point is string literal  with no encoding prefix is evil.
>> if i write
>>
>> char s[] = "あいうえお"  ;
>>
>> MSVC use shift-jis encoding.
>>
>> Japanese will sure to write  something like translate("日本語").
>>
>
> The point is that in the source you should write:
>
>    MessageBoxW(wgettext("Language").c_str(),wgettext("Japanese
> language").c_str(),MB_OK)
>
>    // (ASCII source)
>
> And it would be translated by the dictionaries to
>
>    MessageBoxW(L"言語",L"日本語",MB_OK); // In real calls, not the source code
>
> The point if you use Japanese - inline then you don't need to translate
> strings, and if you do translate then write source code with ASCII strings
> that would work with any encoding and would be understandable for any software)
>
> This is how all translation systems I know work.
>
> Having original text strings in Japanese and translating
> them to French or Hebrew is very-very-bad idea as it
> is much simpler to find somebody to be able to translate
> the text from English to Hebrew then from Japanese to Hebrew.

This is just plain silly. Telling someone who uses language X that in 
order to translate their code to language Y they need to first translate 
their code to English and then translate English to language Y, and that 
this is somehow superior, is just inane reasoning. Supporting such 
reasoning by saying that "everyone" does it that way is equally inane 
for many obvious reasons. It is much better to admit that the 
"translate" part of a locale library may be flawed, or limited, than to 
have to justify such illogical nonsense.

I am not saying that your following the way that gnu Gettext does 
translation is not understandable, in that you chose to follow a popular 
way ot doing something. But I am saying that trying to justify it in the 
illogical way that you do, given a perfectly reasonable objection, is 
completely wrong.