Dear Paul, Here's some information that I prepared for translators of the Rcmdr package, slightly edited to make it more generic. Perhaps you'll find it useful:
R provides a general facility for translating messages from English to other languages using the GNU gettext translation tools <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>. These tools are used both for R itself and for R packages, though most packages are not set up to allow translation. How translation works in R is described in a 2005 article in R News, available at <https://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2005-1.pdf>. There is also some information in the R manuals, at <https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Internationalization>, <https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html#Localization-of-messages>, and at <http://developer.r-project.org/Translations30.html>. The general procedure for preparing translations is very simple. I'll explain it briefly in case you're unfamiliar with it. The package sources include the plain-text file <package-name>.pot in the package po subdirectory. You would copy this file to R-xx.po (where xx is the usually two-character code for your language -- e.g., fr for French, thus R-fr.po) and then edit that file to provide translations of the Rcmdr messages. (In your case, you could work backwards from the .po file you received to make a .pot file.) You would then use the GNU gettext tools (available at <https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>) to compile your .po file into a .mo file, conventionally named R-<package-name>.mo. The .mo file would be placed in the package sources at inst/po/xx/LC_MESSAGES/ . You would then test your translation by building and installing the package. I hope this helps, John ----------------------------- John Fox, Professor Emeritus McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Web: http::/socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox > On Feb 8, 2020, at 3:14 AM, Paul Gilbert <pgilbert...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I have been sent .po and .mo files with message translations for one of my > packages. The .po file I know goes in the source package po/ directory but I > have not had .mo files previously. The translator thinks the .mo file goes in > inst/po. The .mo file seems to be generated from the .po file, but I am not > sure if that happens in the install of the source package, or in some > pre-process. I thought I could determine this by looking at an installed > package, but I don't see .po or .mo files in installed packages. So far I > have had no luck finding documentation on these details. So I have three > questions. > > -Should the .mo file be included in the package, and if so, where? > > -When a package is installed, where does the translation information go in > the directory structure of the library? > > -Is this documented somewhere? (Please not a vague reference to 'Writing R > Extensions', I've looked there and many other places. I need a section or > page reference.) > > Thanks, > Paul Gilbert > > ______________________________________________ > R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
