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English(USA), and in Germany all German terms are superseded by their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
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