Re: i18n and internal errors

Andrew Cagney
2005-02-14T17:41:51Z

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 21:24:15 -0700
>>From: Kevin Buettner <kevinb@redhat.com>
>>Cc: gdb@sources.redhat.com
>>
>>On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 21:53:41 -0500 (EST)
>>Mark Kettenis <kettenis@gnu.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Should we really be marking internal errors for translation? I think
>>>we shouldn't. These are all messages the end-user shouldn't be
>>>seeing. Having them translated, makes it only more difficult for us
>>>to fix bugs.
>>
>>I agree.
>
>
> I don't.

Eli is correct. Any normal user output (which includes internal-error)
needs to be translated.

Of course there are the fringes - the output from "maint print symbols"
for instance - where there is little return on the translation effort.
I'm avoiding such code for the moment - something to debate later.

Andrew

> Mark gave 2 reasons for not translating internal errors:
>
> . end users should not see these messages
> . having them translated makes it difficult to fix bugs
>
> If I understand these reasons as Mark meant, they actually say: if an
> end user sees and reports such a message in translated form, those of
> us who don't understand the translated message will have difficulty
> finding and fixing the bug.
>
> If that's what Mark meant, then he obviously says that end users
> _will_ see these messages. Messages that end users see should be
> translated, so that the users will understand them easily. Fatal
> messages should certainly be understood unequivocally, because it's
> crucial that the user understands the situation on which she is asked
> to act (dump core, continue, etc.)
>
> As for the difficulty in fixing the bugs, the fatal messages typically
> include a file name and a line number which point to the place where
> the bug was caught. I think that alleviates some of the difficulties.
>
> Also, it is customary for users to translate the messages into English
> when reporting bugs (a case in point is messages from the OS utilities
> that have some relevance to the bug being reported), since the users
> generally understand that English is a better language to talk to
> maintainers.
>
> As another data point, none of the GNU projects in which I'm involved
> decided not to translate messages about internal errors.
>
> So, on balance, I think we should translate the internal error
> messages.
>