Well, it seems there are aspects relating to such matters which are pretty straightforward but some aren't at all. If some application maintainers don't care about such matters (which some politics around the edges) that makes such matters very difficult to handle and maintain.
OSs are large, decentralized enterprises so, any attempt at making all parts nicely play together may be futile? I think a large part of this is related to the belief that "there are bad, uninformed scientist and technical people, and there are those who speak English", "why don't you say it in English" ... Documentation projects are maintained multi-lingually and OS are internally designed to gracefully deal with many-to-many relationships so that problem seem to be more of a "cultural", than technical one. Imagine! (as Lennon sang) that during Debian installation you would ask the user which languages are his/hers and all you have said to me would be done by the installer. A user land account for each language. So if I am working on a shell as Hindi-me or German-me all settings will be accordingly reset. Some files' content you may even want to keep in synch. Say, for all your teaching material to be managed by a CMS ... Except true-blue-gringos in the in the U.S., most people in the world are multi-kulti (neurobiologists even say that multi-* is healthy to your brain/mind). I am not so smart dealing with my multi-*. At times I have to look real hard at a document to notice if it is written in English or German or I print a document and students let me know it was not the right one. It is not only about your "mind", but your feelings as well. I have had girls growl at me for speaking English to them while we are having sex ;-). Most people relate that it is like you have more than one mind or as if your various "minds" were "aware of/'spying on' one another". Once I asked a 9 year-old multi-kulti girl I was tutoring (Italian + Cuban parents and raised in the U.S.) which country did she like best. She reacted like she couldn't quite understand what I meant and after a while her answer was: "I like them all -in different ways-". So, we are talking here about those "different ways", -compartmentalizing- and "liking them all". I think if enough people culture such matters we could make a difference. > Is there any chance that this is an X-Y problem? If you are referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem I wonder if your own question/mind is. What could possibly be X-Y about a multi-lingual set up? lbrtchx
