Hello John and Peter (and all),
Yes, it is probably better to use the same method as R uses, with po
files and gettext(). We are currently translating R in French and it
takes one hour or two to figure out how to do these translations with,
let's say, poedit. We would not like to deal with different exotic
translation files for different additonal packages.
I volunteer to translate RCmdr in French. You know it will be very
useful for my students.
You are certainly better to ask Brian Ripley directly for details on how
to implement this. However, may I suggest you first look at the code and
the ./po subdirectory of base and recommended packages of the R 2.1.x
version (for instance, source of base, graphics, or packages in the VR
bundle -class, MASS, nnet & spatial-) to get an idea of changes
introduced for internationalization.
Best,
Philippe
..............................................<°}))><........
) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( ( Prof. Philippe Grosjean
) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( ( Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems
) ) ) ) ) Mons-Hainaut University, Pentagone (3D08)
( ( ( ( ( Academie Universitaire Wallonie-Bruxelles
) ) ) ) ) 8, av du Champ de Mars, 7000 Mons, Belgium
( ( ( ( (
) ) ) ) ) phone: + 32.65.37.34.97, fax: + 32.65.37.30.54
( ( ( ( ( email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( ( web: http://www.umh.ac.be/~econum
) ) ) ) ) http://www.sciviews.org
( ( ( ( (
..............................................................
Peter Dalgaard wrote:
"John Fox" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
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.
Offhand, I think you're better off latching on to an existing
mechanism. Tcl has something known as "msgcat", which appears to be
similar to GNU gettext (and there are conversion tools), or perhaps
you could interface to gettext itself (we do have the gettext()
function at the R level).
Two tricky bits:
(A) shortcut keys, which need to be coordinated to menu items
("Accept/Break/Cancel" translates to "Accepter/Afbryd/Annuller" in
Danish - if you're a little malicious, anyway)
(B) What is the general mechanism for extending message catalogs by an
R package?
Brian may well have thought of this stuff already.
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