That's a great high-level view. I think dothebart is looking for
something more specific, though, because I had asked him whether he was
interested in doing a translation.
Here's a good place to start:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/
This is the home page for GNU gettext, a facility which allows you to
write software in English and then plug in translations without a whole
lot of modification to the program. Basically you just change your string
syntax "from this" _("to this") and then link in the requisite libraries,
and gettext handles the rest.
Last week I finished "gettextizing" WebCit, and it is ready for us to
attempt to plug in its first language pack.
dothebart: if you're ready to attempt a translation, please browse the
gettext manual to get an idea of how it works, particularly the section
about creating a new PO file. What you want to do is create an empty PO
file using this command:
xgettext --keyword=_ *.c
And then edit the file it generates (it'll probably be called
"messages.po"). It'll contain all of the strings used in the WebCit
program, followed by empty strings. Those empty strings are where you put
the translations.
Once that's done, send me the completed file, and I'll plug it into the
system. Since this is the first time we're doing this, I may have to
fiddle with the build for a while before we can make it automatically
detect the language being used.
One final note: remember, we are using UTF-8, not ISO-8859-1.
