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

Subject: Re: [boost] [locale] Review of Boost.Locale library
From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-04-17 13:51:43

On 4/17/2011 1:38 PM, Peter Dimov wrote:
> 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.

It is horrendous to me because of it is illogical and nobody appears to 
have recognize that.

>
>> 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.)

Things often becomes "practical" when there is no better available 
solution or few better solutions which are accessible and usable. But 
practicality to me does not mean correctness. I am arguing for 
correctness, which in this case means to me the ability to 'translate' 
from one encoding to another encoding. I do not think you can seriously 
argue that 'translation' from language X to language Y is more correct 
if it must go from language X to language E to language Y.