bpo-31793: Documentation: Specialize smart-quotes for japanese. by JulienPalard · Pull Request #4006 · python/cpython (original) (raw)

A question is "Did smart quote been introduced just to fix translation of lazy translators, or is it a really interesting feature even for good translators". If it's "just to fix lazyness" I would be OK to drop it, let's do things properly in the first place.

I searched an answer to this question and found http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/smartquotes.html

Looks like SmartQuotes is also used to transform --- into — so it look like they're used by the english documentation too, not only translations, some can be seen around: https://docs.python.org/3/distutils/apiref.html#module-distutils.filelist

So completly removing smartquotes will also ask for english documents to be reviewed (actually a single sed is probably enough).

The smartquotes documentat also say it may be better to do it right in the first place than relying on smartquotes:

Even if you do care about accurate typography, you still might want to think twice before "auto-educating" the quote characters in your documents. As there is always a chance that the algorithm gets it wrong, you may instead prefer to use the compose key or some other means to insert the correct Unicode characters into the source.

If we're going to remove smartquotes, I'm OK to review french translation myself to fix quotes, let's not make this a blocking issue.