Dear R-devel list members, I'm considering adding support for other languages than English to the Rcmdr package. I understand that the use of Tcl/Tk by the Rcmdr package means I won't be able to make full use of the internationalization facilities in R 2.1.0. I'm interested, therefore, in whether the following, more limited, strategy (which bears some similarity to the internationalization facilities in R) seems reasonable or whether there's a better approach. As well, I'm interested in whether the proposed approach is sufficiently flexible to be worthwhile -- does it cover enough languages?
It would be simple for me to provide a file of messages, labels, and other text used by the Rcmdr, organizing this file with one message per line. A copy of the file, named, e.g., messages.francais, could contain translations into another language (e.g, French). Setting options(Rcmdr=list(language=francais)) would then activate translation when the Rcmdr starts up, reading the messages file into a data frame, treating the English text as row names. The messages could be handled by a function, say Text(), which would return English or translated text, as appropriate. Some experimentation shows that message retrieval by this scheme is essentially instantaneous even when there are several thousand relatively long messages in the data frame. Thanks, John -------------------------------- John Fox Department of Sociology McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario Canada L8S 4M4 905-525-9140x23604 http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox ______________________________________________ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
