Re: i18n and internal errors

[Andrew Cagney <cagney@gnu.org>]

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.
>