2005/12/23, Axel Liljencrantz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>On Wed, 2005-12-21 at 20:00 +0100, Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen wrote:
>>Being mostly active in translation and other internationalisation
>>(i18n) and localisation (l12n) stuff, and having found no mention of
>>these subjects in the archive, I wanted to ask if this was something
>>that had been thought about at all?
>
>Hmm, I belive there was an exchange between me and Jan Fader on this
>subject, it should be in the archive. Perhaps it was done in private
>by mistake?
I believe I searched for i18n, l12n, internationalization,
internationalisation, localization, localisation, and translation,
none of which yielded anything relevant.
>>I've currently made fish the default shell for my younger brother's
>>account (who's fairly fluent in (American) English), and will set it
>>as default for the temporary account for my American friend coming
>>over during the holidays, but I'm not going to do this for my mother's
>>account, since it would matter none to her whether she is using bash,
>>zsh, fish, or what be it, as long as they don't 'speak' Danish.
>>(Actually, since bash and zsh doesn't speak that much in and of
>>themself, most of their output is already in Danish...)
>>This would probably be one of the ultimate userfriendliness features
>>that could be implemented, from my POV. :)
>>
>>(I will gladly volunteer to do Danish.)
>
>Thank you.
Heh, you're welcome. :)
>As one of the main goals of fish is user friendliness, ttranslations
>make perfect sense. If you wish to do the danish translation, and Jan
>Fader is still ok with doing the German one, then I guess I'd say
>there are enough volounteers to motivate moving forward with
>translations.
Woohoo! :)
>So, the most common translation library seems to be gettext. Are
>there any alternatives, and if so, what do they offer that gettext
>doesn't?
I believe there are alternatives, but I can seem to recall any. (None
within the FOSS domain, anyway.) The primary advantage of gettext is
its widespreadness. There are translation tools for (next to) all
platforms, including web-based ones! Gettext is also implemented in
pretty much all modern languages (Python, Perl, C, C++, Tcl/Tk, Ruby,
...) and I would suppose that there are few FOSS programmers that
doesn't (at least) know about it.
I can't remember of gettext supports differentiating between
right-to-left (rtl) and left-to-right (ltr) text.
Another drawback of gettext is that the translation strings are
completely out of context, and some languages *might* have a problem
with this. (I haven't yet encountered a reference to such a problem
with Danish, but Danish and English isn't as different as, say,
English and Arabic, Russian, or Japanese.) Ie., if the translation-id
is "Password: ", that would be used in *all* instances of _('Password:
'), and while this would work out for the better in 99.9% of the cases
with Indo-European languages, it just might not work at all in 50% or
more cases with non-Indo-European languages. (It also just might. I
mainly know about English and Danish (and other Nordic/Scandinavian
languages), as well as wee bit about Irish (and other Celtic
languages) and Portuguese. All Indo-European.)
Gettext is quite mature though, and if there were any *serious*
drawbacks, I would like to believe that they were long gone by now. I
am, however, not sure.
I believe there are some XML libraries about, for translation
purposes, now that I think about it, but I am not sure these would be
suitable for a shell, let alone if the overhead of added XML support
in the binaries would be appreciated!
Anyway, I've also written to Dansk-gruppen's mailing list, asking if
anyone there knows about alternatives. (Dansk-gruppen is a group of
Danish FOSS translators.)
--
Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen <http://freso.dk/>
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