[Lazarus] Please remove Arabic language from the release version

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Maxim Ganetsky schrieb:
> 04.08.2012 2:57, silvioprog пишет:

>> This has hindered my support for Lazarus, because the users can't
>> found the options (because all menus come in portuguese language). :(
> 
> Portuguese users can't read Portuguese, so they are even completely 
> unable to find language switch? Interesting. :)

Most languages don't have *native* words for computer-technic terms. In 
Portuguese the wording even differs between Portuguese and Brazilian.

Q: how many languages have *really* native computer terms?

The evolution of computers took place mainly in German(y) and 
English(USA), and in Germany all German terms are superseded by their 
English counterparts, in the past decades. French is a special case, 
because the government enforces (by law?) the use of French words for 
everything.

I'm not sure about other languages, but I've learned that e.g. Russian 
terms are so long, that they are almost unused in practice. At least 
it's *known* from internationalization of programs, that English terms 
are the shortest of all languages (except Chinese perhaps ;-) and much 
more space has to be left in a GUI for the nationalized terms. An IDE 
has such problems everywhere, with a risk of truncated translated labels.

In case of Arabic and Hebrew, or other RTL reading languages, I could 
understand that those speakers prefer LTR text in their programs, 
instead of an mix of native RTL with English LTR keywords and names for 
the standard units, types, variables and subroutines.

When original Pascal or other languages only allowed for ASCII 
characters in source code, perhaps extended with a few unsystematic 
codepages, it was common practice to use English terms even for the 
identifiers in self-written code and, more important, in libraries for 
common use.


So I can see an use for a non-English IDE only in teaching young 
children, which cannot read English documentation. OTOH it may be more 
the *teachers* having problems with English, the kids will learn new 
terms much faster than they can. And why explain the meaning of "Datei" 
or "Bearbeiten", which are not understood intuitively in a top-level 
menu, when the same explanation also applies to "File" or "Edit"?

DoDi