perhaps we should somehow arrange for tex's terminal (error, etc.) messages to be localized. knuth made some provision for this by using different pool files, and the Poles actually created a Polish pool file (tex-pool.pl, etc.). no one else ever did.

nowadays, with pool files being compiled and many strings being written outside of the .web files, that wouldn't be enough in itself. more work needed, besides some kind of .po <-> .pool process.

a big distribution problem in my mind is inducing the dependency on gettext in our binaries. so many different versions out there, and if it doesn't work, probably get crashes. probably easy to create crashes. on the other hand, i can't quite imagine compiling gettext into the binaries, but maybe. reimplementing it does not sound feasible.

paulo ney de souza gave a presentation at tug'14 about this, stating that for non-latin languages (indic in his case), it would make a big difference. he had a non-solution (his term) at the terminal driver level, but that affected everything done in the terminal window, not just the tex run.