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

Subject: Re: [boost] Fw: [locale] Formal review of Boost.Locale library
From: Artyom (artyomtnk_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-04-15 10:20:37

----- Original Message ----
> From: Ryou Ezoe <boostcpp_at_[hidden]>
> To: boost_at_[hidden]
> Sent: Fri, April 15, 2011 12:59:03 AM
> Subject: Re: [boost] Fw: [locale] Formal review of Boost.Locale library
> 
> Here is a sad fact.
> It's so hard to find a Japanese programmer who also knows  English.
> Believe me, there are many Japanese boost users.
> But they don't  contribute in here because they don't know English one bit.
> Requiring English  means this library will be never used by Japanese.
> 
> I really don't like  the current situation too. But it cannot be changed.
> 

I'll try to explain more about the ASCII requirements.

One important feature of the catalogs is that if the
translation string does not exists in the catalog the
original one is shown.

This allows translating the software part-by-part
and more then that it allows to do it independently
of its development.

In real world there is a very few software that has
100% of messages translated so such fallback
is very important.

Indeed you see once in a while an untranslated
message in English in most software.

But as English is in generally international language
most users tolerate it in certain level.

What would happen if the message that is accidentally
shown is in Japanese and a used have no chance to find
what does it mean at all.

All literate uses know English at least on some basic
level and probably would be able to google for this
text... Japanese.. No way!

That it is why the original strings should be kept
in English.

The second reason is a performance. What is the
encoding of the source string? Latin1, ASCII, UTF-8,
Shift-JIS? Even if it is known and widely used UTF-8
you would have to do charset conversion while
with ASCII you just cast. As it is (almost) universal
subset of all encodings.

So there are plenty good reasons to do this.

And if you have troubles with programmers
to know English let them write in poor English
and then ask copyrighter to review their strings.

And if they really struggle use Romaji.

Believe me you have more troubles handling
source files encoding correctly.

> 
> Please, Don't  start plural handling system.
> It's bad for localization.
> Plural should not  be handled by software which will be localized to
> all known languages.
> You  can use.
> 
> I have 2 shirt(s).
> 

I'm sorry but almost all but East-Asian languages have plural
forms. You have no idea how silly it sounds in Russian to
miss it.

So no. It is very important part and "I have 2 shirt(s)" is bad
localization.

Artyom