[Lazarus] Please remove Arabic language from the release version

[marcelo.bp]

Hi list,

It seems that another round to discuss the brazilian portuguese translations 
took place!

I agree with you DoDi.

I had this problem when translating to portuguese. Commonly in English, a 
word can represent a entire idea, and in most cases is impossible to explain 
that idea in a portuguese word. So is quite common substitute a word for a 
phrase. This is awful because all the time i had problems with the UI.

Just to remeber our collegues here that the brazilian portuguese 
translations (pt_BR) is almost 100% complete.
The problem is that i just continued the job that others contributors did 
before me.
I agree that improvement is need, and i always expected the contribution of 
the brazilian community. So far, i never was contacted for any suggestions 
or never heard about suggestions here in the mailing-list.

As always i say, suggestions are welcomed.

I just want to remeber that this jobs involve another parts of Lazarus than 
just IDE itself. So LCL, IDEIntf, components, examples and tools have their 
translations. Other thing, it´s not so easy to figure the context of a 
translation. Usually you have a line of text that you don´t know exactly 
were or when it will be displayed. So the lack of the context, usually led 
to a poor translation.

The objective of a translation is to give people that are not familiar with 
the English language to be acquainted with the IDE. Of course, if you are a 
experienced programmer, as Maxim said, just turn the language switch to 
english and you are done.
I don´t agree with mixed translation with english words. Just in a few 
especific cases, where a translation will not benefit or cause IDE GUI to 
look terrible that i maintain such words.

Anyway, the 1.0 is almost here. So lets do the best to it before the 
official release :)

Marcelo B Paula

-----Mensagem Original----- 
From: Hans-Peter Diettrich
Sent: Saturday, August 04, 2012 8:17 AM
To: Lazarus mailing list
Subject: Re: [Lazarus] Please remove Arabic language from the release 
version

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