perl-i18n

Localization

2003-01-30 05:36:17
Just a note: if you're writing documentation in two different languages (or more), there's no rule that says you can't just glom them all in one big file. Clearly this becomes crazy when you have a dozen languages, but with just two or three, imagine:


=item foo($bar, $baz)

This function grunkulates $bar with $baz.

Cette fonction engroncule le $bar avec le $baz.


This seems the simplest way.  The trouble I can see is:
1) As I said, this doesn't scale well when you have a dozen languages.
2) It assumes that the languages you're documenting in in this one big file, are languages that you can express in a single encoding. (Otherwise we have the near-Hell of a document in multiple encodings at once.) 3) It's fine for cases where the module is written by one person who knows all the languages he's documenting in. In cases where there's more people, and they don't /all/ know /all/ the languages, my head explodes.

So far I've been consoling myself that the trouble spots in all three cases are actually pretty rare, and that the most common case is one where there's no trouble: one author maintaining documentation in English and Some-Other-Language.

So my nightmare is there's three authors of a complex module suite, they all speak English (hopefully); but besides that, one speaks Arabic, one speaks Chinese, and one speaks Vietnamese, and they're all trying to keep their quadlingual docset in synch (English, Viet, Arabic, Chinese); and NOBODY has a Unicode editor, everybody has only an editor that understands ASCII and their language-specific encoding, and dumps core when presented with any of the other encodings.
--
Sean M. Burke    http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/


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