[Pascal Quantin <pascal.quantin@xxxxxxxxx>]

2014-11-06 21:58 GMT+01:00 Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

On Nov 6, 2014, at 11:44 AM, Pascal Quantin <pascal.quantin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 2014-11-06 20:33 GMT+01:00 Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
>> On Nov 6, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Pascal Quantin <pascal.quantin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>> And as I said in an earlier email, letting a user manually select the language in an application is common practice on Windows.
>>
>> So what are some examples of applications that support this?
>
> To name a few of them: Notepad++, CCleaner, Defraggler, LibreOffice, VirtualBox, jv16 Power Tools, VLC, PDFCreator, SumatraPDF...
> To simplify things, applications seem to fall in 2 categories: either you download a specific package with just your language, or a global installer where user can override at any time the language.

Would another two categories be:

        applications from the free software community, which support manually setting the language;

        applications not from the free software community, which don't?

I.e., are there any applications not from the free software community that support this?

As almost all software installed on my computer are from the free software community, I cannot fully answer this question. Total Commander does but as it is a Shareware, I'm not sure in which category you would classify it. jv16 Power Tools is a commercial software, but was created from an initially free one. Maybe others could give better examples.
 

If not, why not?  Is it because the free software community are paying more attention to user needs, or is it because a lot of them come from the UNIX+{X11,Wayland,Mir} desktop world, in which not all desktops necessarily offer a system-wide GUI option to select the language (KDE does, GNOME presumably does, but other desktop environments, especially the "here's a window manager, that's enough" environments, might not).

Not sure, but what I can tell you is that several of the programs I listed above are only available on Windows and offer this option. Definitely free community seem to pay more attention to user needs, maybe simply because people contribute so as to improve their own experience when using those software.

I'm *really* trying to understand the reasons why an additional "select the language" option, over and above a system "select the language" option, is useful, and whether it's useful in *all* environments or only in ones where there isn't a system "select the language" option.

You seem to assume that all language translations are at the same quality as English. This is unfortunately not the case, especially for small projects not having a big community putting a lot of effort for maintaining an always evolving translation over the time. This is definitely a huge work and I admire people devoting time to this.