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gbdev
Translate the documentation
RGDBS' output is currently entirely in English. This is mostly fine, but it may be interesting to respect the user's locale whenever possible.
This would be split into several steps:
- Decide what should be localized, and what shouldn't be
- Provide translations
- Integrate these somehow
Step 2 is the most beginner-friendly part, not necessarily needing any knowledge of the codebase.
As for step 3, what about gettext?
As it has been metioned on discord, the biggest problem with translating the tools themselves is that this makes "googling for the error" really hard. I remember having my system in Spanish and getting GCC errors in spanish, and finding it very tricky to find a solution for them. As soon as I switched to English it was much easier.
Manuals and documentation, sure, that's fine. However, that creates problems when the English documentation is updated and the translations stay out of date. You'd need commitment from the original translators to not let this happen.
The biggest issue with translations is that they are often very bad, and that's very hard to verify unless you speak the language yourself. For almost all of us who speak English well, and for most people who speak it at least passably (and that tends to include almost everyone into hobby programming), good English is a hundred times better than broken native text.
Not to mention that sometimes other languages don't have words to express computer terms, so it ends up being half English anyway.
Now that the scope of this issue has been limited to documentation:
It's been suggested to provide a linter to enforce prefixes for labels by what memory region they're in: s for $A000-$BFFF, w for $C000-$DFFF, h for $FF80-$FFFE, r for other values in $FF00-$FF7F. One user even suggested prefixing ROM symbols with the data format (e.g. pb16 for compressed using PB16). If that lands, I'd suggest that documentation about this sort of Hungarian notation be translated at least into Hungarian as a proof of concept for the process of translating documentation.
