[Python-Dev] Fwd: i18n (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Aug 25 20:26:05 CEST 2010

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 10:59 AM, Alcino Dall'Igna Jr <adijbr at gmail.com> wrote:

To those beginners in programming that are not English speakers there are 3 problems to be solved: 1) the logic (this is unavoidable) 2) the programming language (hard but quite simple) 3) the messages (hard and not simple)

Those who could not cope with (1) could not be programmers (2) difficult but not the main (so a 2nd step) (3) the worst but more treatable and more largely useful The i18n of (2) is mainly to be used in initial stages and could not be generally applicable (maybe just some European languages). This probably could require to rewrote the scanner (or maybe only the grammar, I haven't gone so deep yet) so it's not that big of a problem, it hardly affects the parser and interpreter, that are the more complex tasks.

IMO (2) is a bad idea. You'd have to translate not just the keywords but also the builtins and the standard library. Or else your users would still live in a mixed-world and the benefit would be minimal. But translating the stdlib is too much work. (It can't be fully automated, due to things like getattr(x, 'foo').) There's also the danger that users would write code in their local dialect and expect to share it with others in another locale. Let them read and write broken English, it's unavoidable anyway! (Probably they know more broken English than you think. After all they are using computers already. :-)

If (3) could enter the main trunk it would be a great help by itself. In this case access to international help is useless due the original difficulties with the language, remember I'm talking about kids mainly, and 1st stage to programming for youngsters. There are two main ways to do this, one is using codes as indicated, but I prefer using the more generally accepted and used, with messages catalogs using gettext and the like.

That sounds painful, but in general I am okay with the idea of translating messages. I think the system messages (those that go with IOError and OSError) may already be translated. How to do it without off-putting the core developers may end up being a research problem. :-)

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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