VMD-L Mailing List

From: L. Michel Espinoza-Fonseca (mef_at_ddt.biochem.umn.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 04 2008 - 15:48:41 CST

Mein Gott! You forgot to mention having some smažený sýr and drinking
krušovice while admiring the Vltava in České Budějovice.

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 2:44 PM, Andrew Dalke <dalke_at_dalkescientific.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Alba Colet Subirachs wrote:
>
> > ACS> I'm an university student and I'm working in 3D viewing of VMD
> > as a
> > ACS> teacher assistant. Also, I'm doing a research to translate the
> > VMD
> > ACS> package from english to spanish or catalan, and I'm interested to
>
>
>
> On Mar 4, 2008, at 6:57 PM, Axel Kohlmeyer wrote:
> > please note, that the following is my very personal opinion
> > and that this does not necessarily reflect the view of the
> > VMD developers and support people in the Schulten group.
>
> > VMD does not use any native language support tools,
> > hence a translation would be a herculean task.
>
> To bring in some history, I was the primary developer on VMD in the
> mid-1990s. My, that was a while ago. I added prototype support for
> one GUI window in Turkish, with help from Attila Gürsoy, who was
> working on NAMD.
>
> As Axel pointed out, it would have been hard to handle
> internationalization correctly. The GUI library we used had fixed
> sizes for the fields, so if one language used a very large word for
> something where English uses a small word then the long word would
> get truncated.
>
> More modern libraries handle this better, but it requires careful
> planning to make it work correctly. I might have done that but
> Attila advised me that effectively everyone who was doing something
> where VMD would be useful would know English well enough to be able
> to use it.
>
> As far as I can tell, that was the right solution. Over the last 14
> years of VMD development, there has been very little call for this
> feature. Though there could be, say, a big Spanish demand that I
> don't know about because the demand is expressed in Spanish.
>
> There are other things to worry about with i18n. Who does the
> translations? Who maintains them? Terms like "copy" and "edit"
> should be consistent with other software and getting those right is
> also hard. There's problems with word order, and plurals, and
> declension, and for the general case problems about the direction of
> text.
>
> The Ubuntu/KDE/Gnome people have done a good job on making this
> simpler, but simpler != easy.
>
>
>
> > finally, if people write scripts (and e-mails) in 7-bit ASCII
> > and english, a much larger number of people can help in case
> > of problems.
>
> As someone who lives in Göteborg, Sweden, I would like to spell the
> city's name correctly (though the English name is Gothenburg.)
>
> I would also like to talk about things being 10Å apart.
>
> The naïve débutante from Doña Ana County, New Mexico won £5,000
> eating jalapeño crêpes.
> Mötley Crüe drank Jägermeister, Piña Coladas, and Gewürztraminer on
> the Champs-Élysées.
>
>
> :)
>
> Andrew
> dalke_at_dalkescientific.com
>
>
>
>