> Put another way, while someone not familiar with English could conceivably
> learn to use the SDL by learning the keywords by rote, if they were not
> trained in the use of ASCII-style data input, would they be unable to 
> code in POV-Ray SDL?

The hurdle is bigger, but can't be avoided completely. Localizing
language keywords is not a good idea, and you wouldn't dream of
doing it with languages like C or Java. However, in my experience,
people in Asia will be very happy when they can have comments,
file names and GUI texts in their native language. I never
looked in the sources, but I suspect POVRay is currently
using ISO-8559-1 latin encoding and 8-bit characters for
all strings in which case all of the above would fail.

Working with arbitrary non-english text is not so intimidating
as as long as you know what you may no longer take for granted.
Here is a friendly introduction to the topic:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

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