Re: MSGedit fixes [was: Translation strings]

[Scott S. <st...@aj...>]

lau...@uf... said:

 > > I don't think
 > > there is any value, in fact negative value, in translating things
 > > like error messages.  This was discussed on the newsgroup before
 > > with the same resulting opinion.
 > > 
 > 
 > Hmmm... I don't remember this discussion. I don't think it's too late to
 > backtrack the error messages changes. I'm not sure it has no value, 
though.
 > I know that I've had system setups where part of the interface is 
English
 > and the rest is French. There is a "surprising" disconnect when you're
 > constantly working in French and all of a sudden an English message 
pops up.
 > It's even worse when part of the message is in English and the rest is 
in
 > French. It's not crucial or anything but it does give one a "weird" 
feeling.
 > I'm not sure how to describe it.

I believe the original motivation was that error messages are essentially 
part of the API of a command and changing them would cause programs to 
break.  Ideally, the errorCode would have the machine readable error state 
and the message would only be used to display to a user (and therefore 
should be localized).  Unfortunately most commands don't set the errorCode 
to anything useful so this isn't really an option right now.

Maybe we should consider improving the errorCode information with an eye 
toward localizing the messages later.

--Scott