[Python-ideas] Non-English names in the turtle module.

[random832 at fastmail.us]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2015, at 16:53, Al Sweigart wrote:
> https://github.com/asweigart/idle-reimagined/wiki/Turtle-Translations

A couple of downsides I noticed:

"The names will later be formatted to fit the code style of the turtle
module. " is a bit handwavy, to be honest. Are things like "de la"
required or optional? Should an apostrophe/space/hyphen become an
underscore or be omitted? What can be abbreviated? What
case/inflection/conjugation should be used? These are decisions that
have to be made by native speakers based on what will be understandable
to beginners who know each language.

Your names aren't very consistent - I don't know French that well, but I
doubt the module would benefit from mixing "plume", "crayon", and
"stylo". What to call a pen needs to be decided at a high level and used
globally. Also, things like "set...", "get...", "on...", need to be
translated to something consistent throughout the module.

For that matter, the naming conventions in the *English* ones are a bit
questionable and inconsistent. Maybe this is an opportunity to clean up
that API.

Also, a bug to report: I know enough Spanish to know that "pantalla
clara" means "clear screen" as a noun [screen that is clear], not a verb
[clearing the screen]. The English is ambiguous, but most other
languages are not.

For design questions: Is it important to hide the English names? Is it
important to be able to use the classes interchangeably to code that is
written to use a different language's method names? Can the same name in
one language ever translate to two different names in another language
depending on context?