Investigate having R messages and possibly output in multiple languages

[rdstern]

This is discussed in the following presentation.

I wonder if it might now be easy to add to R-Instat? The initial languages seem to include all we have used, except - of course - Swahili!

@lloyddewit could there be a feasibility study on whether this could be a "low-hanging fruit"?

[lloyddewit]

@rdstern
Thank you for the link. The video is 1.5 hours so I just skipped through some key points.
I understand that R is able to display system messages in 16 different languages.
For R-Instat, I assume that you're interested in displaying R system messages (errors, warnings etc.) in other languages (e.g. French). Did I understand correctly?

In R-Instat, I think R warnings and errors are always shown in message boxes. The message box may contain the R warning/error and some additional R-Instat text. R-Instat does not currently translate message boxes. So even if the R error message was in French, then currently the rest of the message box would still be in English.

According to this link, the R language can be changed by setting an environment variable. I tried this in the R-Instat script window but it had no effect. There may be something simple I am doing wrong or it may be a limitation of how R-Instat interacts with R. It would need investigating by someone with knowledge of R environments.

So I guess the next step is to determine the relative priority of this and decide if its worth asking an R developer to get this working on the command line. If that is possible then it should not be difficult for R-Instat to execute the necessary R command(s) whenever the language is changed.