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Chapter 11

Libraries and Components

We sometimes use libraries and components which are not very popular. We may have to pay

special attention for internationalization of these libraries and components.

On the other hand, we can use libraries and components for improvement of internationalization.

This chapter introduces such a libraries and components.

11.1 Gettext and Translation

GNU Gettext is a tool to internationalize messages a software outputs according to locale status

of

LC_MESSAGES

. A

gettext

ized software contains messages written in various languages (ac 

cording to available translators) and a user can choose them using environmental variables. GNU

gettext is a part of Debian system.

Install

gettext

package and read info pages for details.

Don't use non ASCII characters for '

msgid

'. Be careful because you may tend to use ISO 8859 

1 characters. For example, ' ' (copyright mark; you may be not able to read the copyright mark

NOW in THIS document) is non ASCII character (0xa9 in ISO 8859 1). Otherwise, translators may

feel difficulty to edit catalog files because of conflict between encodings for

msgid

and in

msgstr

.

Be sure the message can be displayed in the assumed environment. In other words, you have to

read the chapter of 'Output to Display' in this document and internationalize the output mecha 

nism of your software prior to

gettext

ization. ENGLISH MESSAGES ARE PREFERRED EVEN

FOR NON ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLE, THAN MEANINGLESS BROKEN MESSAGES.

The 2nd (3rd, . . . ) byte of multibyte characters or all bytes of non ASCII characters in stateful

encodings can be 0x5c (same to backslash in ASCII) or 0x22 (same to double quote in ASCII).

These characters have to properly escaped because present version of GNU gettext doesn't care

the 'charset' subitem of '

Content Type

' item for '

msgstr

'.