Re: [boost] [locale] Review of Boost.Locale library

Subject: Re: [boost] [locale] Review of Boost.Locale library
From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-04-17 13:38:57

Edward Diener wrote:

> The fact that translation always begin from English ( or perhaps some 
> other
> narrow character language ) to something else is horrendous.

I wouldn't agree. In practice, this is a reasonable way to do it. It may not 
be ideal for Japan, but it isn't horrendous, either.

> I do understand that translation is just one part of this large library, 
> but I
> hope that the implementer undestands how ridiculous it is to assume that
> non-English programmers are going to be willing to translate from English
> to language X rather than from their own language to language X.

As a practical matter, the typical way to localize an application written is 
language Y is to translate it to English first, then to the target languages 
X1..Xn. Finding translators from English to Xi is much easier and more 
affordable than finding translators from Y to Xi for almost all values of Y. 
If non-English programmers can't produce the English messages directly, the 
alternative is to use unique tokens; instead of the text "Hello World" they 
can use "initial_greeting" (possibly in a phonetic representation of their 
language, but programmers usually can handle English at such a basic level - 
grammar and spelling are optional here).

(I, personally, always use the latter approach instead of leaving English 
text in the code, but both approaches are workable.)