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Comment by gommm | Hacker News Reader

I love Apple's solution when it comes to localization, they will search both the non-localized name and the localized name. So if you're looking for Image Capture, you can find it with Transfert d'Image and with Image Capture.

In the case of Gmail, it would mean that you could search both for in:Bin and in:Trash. The only issue would be if someone creates an additional Bin label in a US locale, then in UK, when searching for that label it would also show items in the trash but that's a better trade of I think.

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This is also how localized special folder names (Documents, Pictures etc) work in Windows. And I think it's also the same in KDE and Gnome?

Only in the search index... If you try to install your application in "C:\Program Files\" on a non-english version of windows, you'll have a bad time...

I use Swedish Windows, and here "C:\Program\" (the localization) and "C:\Program Files\" both work fine and go to the same place.

Not since Vista. These days, you'll always have "Program Files", and if you have the OS configured for a different locale, it'll create a hard link for the localized name. The Windows shell (including the standard file picker dialogs etc) will also use the localized name preferentially whenever it has to display a path that contains one of those folders, but still allows verbatim paths to be used wherever text input is allowed.

well, gnome creates folders in whatever language you installed with, tho it can translate the file manager's sidebar items, I think... so a change of locale means you'd still have the old dir left, and show as old name everywhere except the special shortcuts

AppleScript, for all its faults, handled localization quite impressively. It parsed the whole script into an abstract representation, and could then could display it in another language as needed.

Sadly this feature never got used for making a better frontend to it :(

But none of those languages was a sane programming language.

The vocabulary doesn't matter when the grammar is an incomprehensible pidgin.

Apple script is the quintessential Jobsian "form, not function"

I think this is a good solution, but gmail also lets you create a filter based on a search. So if search is sensitive to the current locale, your filters could break changing the language. [Maybe filters made from searches against a localized label could be converted to language-neutral at storage time...]

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