[josm-dev] Localization of exception messages

[Matthias Julius]

Dirk Stöcker <openstreetmap at dstoecker.de> writes:

> Message intended to be visible to user must be translated. Messages 
> meant as security checks or debugging texts which never should be visible 
> to a user may remain untranslated.
>
> When in doubt they should be translated, but also descriptive for a user.

Sure, if there is a chance a user gets to see the message it should be
localized.  But, there are many that have no meaning to the user
whatsoever and that only get displayed by the unhandled exception
dialog.  To translate those only produces overhead for no benfit.

I would actually argue that in most cases the exception handler needs
to provide a meaningful message to the user because the method that
throws it does not have the context to know what the user actually did
or needs to do in order to solve the problem.

Matthias