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2 <!--
3 Copyright (C) 2004-2005, 2012 Gora Mohanty.
4 Written by Gora Mohanty <gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in>, 2004.
5
6 This manual is covered by the GNU FDL. Permission is granted to copy,
7 distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the
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20 <HTML>
21 <HEAD>
22 <TITLE>A tutorial on Native Language Support using GNU gettext</TITLE>
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51
52 <H1 ALIGN="CENTER">A tutorial on Native Language Support using GNU gettext</H1><DIV CLASS="author_info">
53
54 <P ALIGN="CENTER"><STRONG>G.&nbsp;Mohanty</STRONG></P>
55 <P ALIGN="CENTER"><STRONG>Revision 0.3: 24 July 2004</STRONG></P>
56 </DIV>
57
58 <H3>Abstract:</H3>
59 <DIV CLASS="ABSTRACT">
60 The use of the GNU <TT>gettext</TT> utilities to implement support for native
61 languages is described here. Though, the language to be supported is
62 considered to be Oriya, the method is generally applicable. Likewise, while
63 Linux was used as the platform here, any system using GNU <TT>gettext</TT> should work
64 in a similar fashion.
65
66 <P>
67 We go through a step-by-step description of how to make on-screen messages
68 from a toy program to appear in Oriya instead of English; starting from the
69 programming and ending with the user's viewpoint. Some discussion is also made
70 of how to go about the task of translation.
71 </DIV>
72 <P>
73 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00010000000000000000">
74 Introduction</A>
75 </H1>
76 Currently, both commercial and free computer software is typically written and
77 documented in English. Till recently, little effort was expended towards
78 allowing them to interact with the user in languages other than English, thus
79 leaving the non-English speaking world at a disadvantage. However, that
80 changed with the release of the GNU <TT>gettext</TT> utilities, and nowadays most GNU
81 programs are written within a framework that allows easy translation of the
82 program message to languages other than English. Provided that translations
83 are available, the language used by the program to interact with the user can
84 be set at the time of running it. <TT>gettext</TT> manages to achieve this seemingly
85 miraculous task in a manner that simplifies the work of both the programmer
86 and the translator, and, more importantly, allows them to work independently
87 of each other.
88
89 <P>
90 This article describes how to support native languages under a system using
91 the GNU <TT>gettext</TT> utilities. While it should be applicable to other versions of
92 <TT>gettext</TT>, the one actually used for the examples here is version
93 0.12.1. Another system, called <TT>catgets</TT>, described in the X/Open
94 Portability Guide, is also in use, but we shall not discuss that here.
95
96 <P>
97
98 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00020000000000000000">
99 A simple example</A>
100 </H1>
101 <A NAME="sec:simple"></A>Our first example of using <TT>gettext</TT> will be the good old Hello World program,
102 whose sole function is to print the phrase “Hello, world!” to the terminal.
103 The internationalized version of this program might be saved in hello.c as:
104 <PRE>
105 1 #include &lt;libintl.h&gt;
106 2 #include &lt;locale.h&gt;
107 3 #include &lt;stdio.h&gt;
108 4 #include &lt;stdlib.h&gt;
109 5 int main(void)
110 6 {
111 7 setlocale( LC_ALL, "" );
112 8 bindtextdomain( "hello", "/usr/share/locale" );
113 9 textdomain( "hello" );
114 10 printf( gettext( "Hello, world!\n" ) );
115 11 exit(0);
116 12 }
117 </PRE>
118 Of course, a real program would check the return values of the functions and
119 try to deal with any errors, but we have omitted that part of the code for
120 clarity. Compile as usual with <TT>gcc -o hello hello.c</TT>. The program should
121 be linked to the GNU libintl library, but as this is part of the GNU C
122 library, this is done automatically for you under Linux, and other systems
123 using glibc.
124
125 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00021000000000000000">
126 The programmer's viewpoint</A>
127 </H2>
128 As expected, when the <TT>hello</TT> executable is run under the default locale
129 (usually the C locale) it prints “Hello, world!” in the terminal. Besides
130 some initial setup work, the only additional burden faced by the programmer is
131 to replace any string to be printed with <TT>gettext(string)</TT>, i.e., to
132 instead pass the string as an argument to the <TT>gettext</TT> function. For lazy
133 people like myself, the amount of extra typing can be reduced even further by
134 a CPP macro, e.g., put this at the beginning of the source code file,
135 <PRE>
136 #define _(STRING) gettext(STRING)
137 </PRE>
138 and then use <TT>_(string)</TT> instead of <TT>gettext(string)</TT>.
139
140 <P>
141 Let us dissect the program line-by-line.
142
143 <OL>
144 <LI><TT>locale.h</TT> defines C data structures used to hold locale
145 information, and is needed by the <TT>setlocale</TT> function. <TT>libintl.h</TT>
146 prototypes the GNU text utilities functions, and is needed here by
147 <TT>bindtextdomain</TT>, <TT>gettext</TT>, and <TT>textdomain</TT>.
148 </LI>
149 <LI>The call to <TT>setlocale</TT> () on line 7, with LC_ALL as the first argument
150 and an empty string as the second one, initializes the entire current locale
151 of the program as per environment variables set by the user. In other words,
152 the program locale is initialized to match that of the user. For details see
153 “man <TT>setlocale</TT>.”
154 </LI>
155 <LI>The <TT>bindtextdomain</TT> function on line 8 sets the base directory for the
156 message catalogs for a given message domain. A message domain is a set of
157 translatable messages, with every software package typically having its own
158 domain. Here, we have used “hello” as the name of the message domain for
159 our toy program. As the second argument, /usr/share/locale, is the default
160 system location for message catalogs, what we are saying here is that we are
161 going to place the message catalog in the default system directory. Thus, we
162 could have dispensed with the call to <TT>bindtextdomain</TT> here, and this
163 function is useful only if the message catalogs are installed in a
164 non-standard place, e.g., a packaged software distribution might have
165 the catalogs under a po/ directory under its own main directory. See “man
166 <TT>bindtextdomain</TT>” for details.
167 </LI>
168 <LI>The <TT>textdomain</TT> call on line 9 sets the message domain of the current
169 program to “hello,” i.e., the name that we are using for our example
170 program. “man textdomain” will give usage details for the function.
171 </LI>
172 <LI>Finally, on line 10, we have replaced what would normally have been,
173 <PRE>
174 printf( "Hello, world!\n" );
175 </PRE>
176 with,
177 <PRE>
178 printf( gettext( "Hello, world!\n" ) );
179 </PRE>
180 (If you are unfamiliar with C, the <!-- MATH
181 $\backslash$
182 -->
183 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>n at the end of the string
184 produces a newline at the end of the output.) This simple modification to all
185 translatable strings allows the translator to work independently from the
186 programmer. <TT>gettextize</TT> eases the task of the programmer in adapting a
187 package to use GNU <TT>gettext</TT> for the first time, or to upgrade to a newer
188 version of <TT>gettext</TT>.
189 </LI>
190 </OL>
191
192 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00022000000000000000">
193 Extracting translatable strings</A>
194 </H2>
195 Now, it is time to extract the strings to be translated from the program
196 source code. This is achieved with <TT>xgettext</TT>, which can be invoked as follows:
197 <PRE><FONT color="red">
198 xgettext -d hello -o hello.pot hello.c
199 </FONT></PRE>
200 This processes the source code in hello.c, saving the output in hello.pot (the
201 argument to the -o option).
202 The message domain for the program should be specified as the argument
203 to the -d option, and should match the domain specified in the call to
204 <TT>textdomain</TT> (on line 9 of the program source). Other details on how to use
205 <TT>gettext</TT> can be found from “man gettext.”
206
207 <P>
208 A .pot (portable object template) file is used as the basis for translating
209 program messages into any language. To start translation, one can simply copy
210 hello.pot to oriya.po (this preserves the template file for later translation
211 into a different language). However, the preferred way to do this is by
212 use of the <TT>msginit</TT> program, which takes care of correctly setting up some
213 default values,
214 <PRE><FONT color="red">
215 msginit -l or_IN -o oriya.po -i hello.pot
216 </FONT></PRE>
217 Here, the -l option defines the locale (an Oriya locale should have been
218 installed on your system), and the -i and -o options define the input and
219 output files, respectively. If there is only a single .pot file in the
220 directory, it will be used as the input file, and the -i option can be
221 omitted. For me, the oriya.po file produced by <TT>msginit</TT> would look like:
222 <PRE>
223 # Oriya translations for PACKAGE package.
224 # Copyright (C) 2004 THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
225 # This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
226 # Gora Mohanty &lt;gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in&gt;, 2004.
227 #
228 msgid ""
229 msgstr ""
230 "Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
231 "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
232 "POT-Creation-Date: 2004-06-22 02:22+0530\n"
233 "PO-Revision-Date: 2004-06-22 02:38+0530\n"
234 "Last-Translator: Gora Mohanty &lt;gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in&gt;\n"
235 "Language-Team: Oriya\n"
236 "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
237 "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
238 "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
239
240 #: hello.c:10
241 msgid "Hello, world!\n"
242 msgstr ""
243 </PRE>
244 <TT>msginit</TT> prompted for my email address, and probably obtained my real name
245 from the system password file. It also filled in values such as the revision
246 date, language, character set, presumably using information from the or_IN
247 locale.
248
249 <P>
250 It is important to respect the format of the entries in the .po (portable
251 object) file. Each entry has the following structure:
252 <PRE>
253 WHITE-SPACE
254 # TRANSLATOR-COMMENTS
255 #. AUTOMATIC-COMMENTS
256 #: REFERENCE...
257 #, FLAG...
258 msgid UNTRANSLATED-STRING
259 msgstr TRANSLATED-STRING
260 </PRE>
261 where, the initial white-space (spaces, tabs, newlines,...), and all
262 comments might or might not exist for a particular entry. Comment lines start
263 with a '#' as the first character, and there are two kinds: (i) manually
264 added translator comments, that have some white-space immediately following the
265 '#,' and (ii) automatic comments added and maintained by the <TT>gettext</TT> tools,
266 with a non-white-space character after the '#.' The <TT>msgid</TT> line contains
267 the untranslated (English) string, if there is one for that PO file entry, and
268 the <TT>msgstr</TT> line is where the translated string is to be entered. More on
269 this later. For details on the format of PO files see gettext::Basics::PO
270 Files:: in the Emacs info-browser (see Appdx.&nbsp;<A HREF="#sec:emacs-info">A</A> for an
271 introduction to using the info-browser in Emacs).
272
273 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00023000000000000000">
274 Making translations</A>
275 </H2>
276 The oriya.po file can then be edited to add the translated Oriya
277 strings. While the editing can be carried out in any editor if one is careful
278 to follow the PO file format, there are several editors that ease the task of
279 editing PO files, among them being po-mode in Emacs, <TT>kbabel</TT>, gtranslator,
280 poedit, etc. Appdx.&nbsp;<A HREF="#sec:pofile-editors">B</A> describes features of some of
281 these editors.
282
283 <P>
284 The first thing to do is fill in the comments at the beginning and the header
285 entry, parts of which have already been filled in by <TT>msginit</TT>. The lines in
286 the header entry are pretty much self-explanatory, and details can be found in
287 the gettext::Creating::Header Entry:: info node. After that, the remaining
288 work consists of typing the Oriya text that is to serve as translations for
289 the corresponding English string. For the <TT>msgstr</TT> line in each of the
290 remaining entries, add the translated Oriya text between the double quotes;
291 the translation corresponding to the English phrase in the <TT>msgid</TT> string
292 for the entry. For example, for the phrase “Hello world!<!-- MATH
293 $\backslash$
294 -->
295 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>n” in
296 oriya.po, we could enter “&#x0b28;&#x0b2e;&#x0b38;&#x0b4d;&#x0b15;&#x0b3e;&#x0b30;<!-- MATH
297 $\backslash$
298 -->
299 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>n”. The final
300 oriya.po file might look like:
301 <PRE>
302 # Oriya translations for hello example package.
303 # Copyright (C) 2004 Gora Mohanty
304 # This file is distributed under the same license as the hello example package.
305 # Gora Mohanty &lt;gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in&gt;, 2004.
306 #
307 msgid ""
308 msgstr ""
309 "Project-Id-Version: oriya\n"
310 "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
311 "POT-Creation-Date: 2004-06-22 02:22+0530\n"
312 "PO-Revision-Date: 2004-06-22 10:54+0530\n"
313 "Last-Translator: Gora Mohanty &lt;gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in&gt;\n"
314 "Language-Team: Oriya\n"
315 "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
316 "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
317 "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
318 "X-Generator: KBabel 1.3\n"
319
320 #: hello.c:10
321 msgid "Hello, world!\n"
322 msgstr "&#x0b28;&#x0b2e;&#x0b38;&#x0b4d;&#x0b15;&#x0b3e;&#x0b30;\n"
323 </PRE>
324
325 <P>
326 For editing PO files, I have found the <TT>kbabel</TT> editor suits me the best. The
327 only problem is that while Oriya text can be entered directly into <TT>kbabel</TT>
328 using the xkb Oriya keyboard layouts&nbsp;[<A
329 HREF="memo.html#xkb-oriya-layout">1</A>] and the entries
330 are saved properly, the text is not displayed correctly in the <TT>kbabel</TT> window
331 if it includes conjuncts. Emacs po-mode is a little restrictive, but strictly
332 enforces conformance with the PO file format. The main problem with it is that
333 it does not seem currently possible to edit Oriya text in Emacs. <TT>yudit</TT>
334 is the best at editing Oriya text, but does not ensure that the PO file format
335 is followed. You can play around a bit with these editors to find one that
336 suits your personal preferences. One possibility might be to first edit the
337 header entry with <TT>kbabel</TT> or Emacs po-mode, and then use <TT>yudit</TT> to enter
338 the Oriya text on the <TT>msgstr</TT> lines.
339
340 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00024000000000000000">
341 Message catalogs</A>
342 </H2>
343 <A NAME="sec:catalog"></A>After completing the translations in the oriya.po file, it must be compiled to
344 a binary format that can be quickly loaded by the <TT>gettext</TT> tools. To do that,
345 use:
346 <PRE><FONT color="red">
347 msgfmt -c -v -o hello.mo oriya.po
348 </FONT></PRE>
349 The -c option does detailed checking of the PO file format, -v makes the
350 program verbose, and the output filename is given by the argument to the -o
351 option. Note that the base of the output filename should match the message
352 domain given in the first arguments to <TT>bindtextdomain</TT> and <TT>textdomain</TT> on
353 lines 8 and 9 of the example program in Sec.&nbsp;<A HREF="#sec:simple">2</A>. The .mo
354 (machine object) file should be stored in the location whose base directory is
355 given by the second argument to <TT>bindtextdomain</TT>. The final location of the
356 file will be in the sub-directory LL/LC_MESSAGES or LL_CC/LC_MESSAGES under
357 the base directory, where LL stands for a language, and CC for a country. For
358 example, as we have chosen the standard location, /usr/share/locale, for our
359 base directory, and for us the language and country strings are “or” and
360 “IN,” respectively, we will place hello.mo in /usr/share/locale/or_IN. Note
361 that you will need super-user privilege to copy hello.mo to this system
362 directory. Thus,
363 <PRE><FONT color="red">
364 mkdir -p /usr/share/locale/or_IN/LC_MESSAGES
365 cp hello.mo /usr/share/locale/or_IN/LC_MESSAGES
366 </FONT></PRE>
367
368 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00025000000000000000">
369 The user's viewpoint</A>
370 </H2>
371 Once the message catalogs have been properly installed, any user on the system
372 can use the Oriya version of the Hello World program, provided an Oriya locale
373 is available. First, change your locale with,
374 <PRE><FONT color="red">
375 echo $LANG
376 export LANG=or_IN
377 </FONT></PRE>
378 The first statement shows you the current setting of your locale (this is
379 usually en_US, and you will need it to reset the default locale at the end),
380 while the second one sets it to an Oriya locale.
381
382 <P>
383 A Unicode-capable terminal emulator is needed to view Oriya output
384 directly. The new versions of both gnome-terminal and konsole (the KDE
385 terminal emulator) are Unicode-aware. I will focus on gnome-terminal as it
386 seems to have better support for internationalization. gnome-terminal needs to
387 be told that the bytes arriving are UTF-8 encoded multibyte sequences. This
388 can be done by (a) choosing Terminal <TT>-&gt;</TT> Character Coding <TT>-&gt;</TT>
389 Unicode (UTF-8), or (b) typing “/bin/echo -n -e
390 '<!-- MATH
391 $\backslash$
392 -->
393 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>033%<!-- MATH
394 $\backslash$
395 -->
396 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>G'” in the terminal, or (c) by running
397 /bin/unicode_start. Likewise, you can revert to the default locale by (a)
398 choosing Terminal <TT>-&gt;</TT> Character Coding <TT>-&gt;</TT> Current Locale
399 (ISO-8859-1), or (b) “/bin/echo -n -e '<!-- MATH
400 $\backslash$
401 -->
402 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>033%<!-- MATH
403 $\backslash$
404 -->
405 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>@',” or
406 (c) by running /bin/unicode_stop. Now, running the example program (after
407 compiling with gcc as described in Sec.&nbsp;<A HREF="#sec:simple">2</A>) with,
408 <PRE><FONT color="red">
409 ./hello
410 </FONT></PRE>
411 should give you output in Oriya. Please note that conjuncts will most likely
412 be displayed with a “halant” as the terminal probably does not render Indian
413 language fonts correctly. Also, as most terminal emulators assume fixed-width
414 fonts, the results are hardly likely to be aesthetically appealing.
415
416 <P>
417 An alternative is to save the program output in a file, and view it with
418 <TT>yudit</TT> which will render the glyphs correctly. Thus,
419 <PRE><FONT color="red">
420 ./hello &gt; junk
421 yudit junk
422 </FONT></PRE>
423 Do not forget to reset the locale before resuming usual work in the
424 terminal. Else, your English characters might look funny.
425
426 <P>
427 While all this should give the average user some pleasure in being able to see
428 Oriya output from a program without a whole lot of work, it should be kept in
429 mind that we are still far from our desired goal. Hopefully, one day the
430 situation will be such that rather than deriving special pleasure from it,
431 users take it for granted that Oriya should be available and are upset
432 otherwise.
433
434 <P>
435
436 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00030000000000000000">
437 Adding complications: program upgrade</A>
438 </H1>
439 The previous section presented a simple example of how Oriya language support
440 could be added to a C program. Like all programs, we might now wish to further
441 enhance it. For example, we could include a greeting to the user by adding
442 another <TT>printf</TT> statement after the first one. Our new hello.c source
443 code might look like this:
444 <PRE>
445 1 #include &lt;libintl.h&gt;
446 2 #include &lt;locale.h&gt;
447 3 #include &lt;stdio.h&gt;
448 4 #include &lt;stdlib.h&gt;
449 5 int main(void)
450 6 {
451 7 setlocale( LC_ALL, "" );
452 8 bindtextdomain( "hello", "/usr/share/locale" );
453 9 textdomain( "hello" );
454 10 printf( gettext( "Hello, world!\n" ) );
455 11 printf( gettext( "How are you\n" ) );
456 12 exit(0);
457 13 }
458 </PRE>
459 For such a small change, it would be simple enough to just repeat the above
460 cycle of extracting the relevant English text, translating it to Oriya, and
461 preparing a new message catalog. We can even simplify the work by cutting and
462 pasting most of the old oriya.po file into the new one. However, real programs
463 will have thousands of such strings, and we would like to be able to translate
464 only the changed strings, and have the <TT>gettext</TT> utilities handle the drudgery
465 of combining the new translations with the old ones. This is indeed possible.
466
467 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00031000000000000000">
468 Merging old and new translations</A>
469 </H2>
470 As before, extract the translatable strings from hello.c to a new portable
471 object template file, hello-new.pot, using <TT>xgettext</TT>,
472 <PRE><FONT color="red">
473 xgettext -d hello -o hello-new.pot hello.c
474 </FONT></PRE>
475 Now, we use a new program, <TT>msgmerge</TT>, to merge the existing .po file with
476 translations into the new template file, viz.,
477 <PRE><FONT color="red">
478 msgmerge -U oriya.po hello-new.pot
479 </FONT></PRE>
480 The -U option updates the existing
481 .po file, oriya.po. We could have chosen to instead create a new .po file by
482 using “-o <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&lt;</SPAN>filename<SPAN CLASS="MATH">&gt;</SPAN>” instead of -U. The updated .po file will still
483 have the old translations embedded in it, and new entries with untranslated
484 <TT>msgid</TT> lines. For us, the new lines in oriya.po will look like,
485 <PRE>
486 #: hello.c:11
487 msgid "How are you?\n"
488 msgstr ""
489 </PRE>
490 For the new translation, we could use, “&#x0b06;&#x0b2a;&#x0b23;
491 &#x0b15;&#x0b3f;&#x0b2a;&#x0b30;&#x0b3f; &#x0b05;&#x0b1b;&#x0b28;&#x0b4d;&#x0b24;&#x0b3f;?” in
492 place of the English phrase “How are you?” The updated oriya.po file,
493 including the translation might look like:
494 <PRE>
495 # Oriya translations for hello example package.
496 # Copyright (C) 2004 Gora Mohanty
497 # This file is distributed under the same license as the hello examplepackage.
498 # Gora Mohanty &lt;gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in&gt;, 2004.
499 #
500 msgid ""
501 msgstr ""
502 "Project-Id-Version: oriya\n"
503 "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
504 "POT-Creation-Date: 2004-06-23 14:30+0530\n"
505 "PO-Revision-Date: 2004-06-22 10:54+0530\n"
506 "Last-Translator: Gora Mohanty &lt;gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in&gt;\n"
507 "Language-Team: Oriya\n"
508 "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
509 "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
510 "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
511 "X-Generator: KBabel 1.3\n"
512
513 #: hello.c:10
514 msgid "Hello, world!\n"
515 msgstr "&#x0b28;&#x0b2e;&#x0b38;&#x0b4d;&#x0b15;&#x0b3e;&#x0b30;\n"
516
517 #: hello.c:11
518 msgid "How are you?\n"
519 msgstr "&#x0b06;&#x0b2a;&#x0b23; &#x0b15;&#x0b3f;&#x0b2a;&#x0b30;&#x0b3f; &#x0b05;&#x0b1b;&#x0b28;&#x0b4d;&#x0b24;&#x0b3f;?\n"
520 </PRE>
521
522 <P>
523 Compile oriya.po to a machine object file, and install in the appropriate
524 place as in Sec.&nbsp;<A HREF="#sec:catalog">2.4</A>. Thus,
525 <PRE><FONT color="red">
526 msgfmt -c -v -o hello.mo oriya.po
527 mkdir -p /usr/share/locale/or_IN/LC_MESSAGES
528 cp hello.mo /usr/share/locale/or_IN/LC_MESSAGES
529 </FONT></PRE>
530 You can test the Oriya output as above, after recompiling hello.c and running
531 it in an Oriya locale.
532
533 <P>
534
535 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00040000000000000000">
536 More about <TT>gettext</TT> </A>
537 </H1>
538 The GNU <TT>gettext</TT> info pages provide a well-organized and complete description
539 of the <TT>gettext</TT> utilities and their usage for enabling Native Language
540 Support. One should, at the very least, read the introductory material at
541 gettext::Introduction::, and the suggested references in
542 gettext::Conclusion::References::. Besides the <TT>gettext</TT> utilities described in
543 this document, various other programs to manipulate .po files are discussed in
544 gettext:Manipulating::. Finally, support for programming languages other than
545 C/C++ is discussed in gettext::Programming Languages::.
546
547 <P>
548
549 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00050000000000000000">
550 The work of translation</A>
551 </H1>
552 Besides the obvious program message strings that have been the sole focus of
553 our discussion here, there are many other things that require translation,
554 including GUI messages, command-line option strings, configuration files,
555 program documentation, etc. Besides these obvious aspects, there are a
556 significant number of programs and/or scripts that are automatically generated
557 by other programs. These generated programs might also themselves require
558 translation. So, in any effort to provide support for a given native language,
559 carrying out the translation and keeping up with program updates becomes a
560 major part of the undertaking, requiring a continuing commitment from the
561 language team. A plan has been outlined for the Oriya localization
562 project&nbsp;[<A
563 HREF="memo.html#url:oriya-trans-plan">2</A>].
564
565 <P>
566
567 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00060000000000000000">
568 Acknowledgments</A>
569 </H1>
570 Extensive use has obviously been made of the GNU <TT>gettext</TT> manual in preparing
571 this document. I have also been helped by an article in the Linux
572 Journal&nbsp;[<A
573 HREF="memo.html#url:lj-translation">3</A>].
574
575 <P>
576 This work is part of the project for enabling the use of Oriya under Linux. I
577 thank my uncle, N.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;Pattnaik, for conceiving of the project. We have all
578 benefited from the discussions amidst the group of people working on this
579 project. On the particular issue of translation, the help of H.&nbsp;R.&nbsp;Pansari,
580 A.&nbsp;Nayak, and M.&nbsp;Chand is much appreciated.
581
582 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00070000000000000000">
583 The Emacs info browser</A>
584 </H1>
585 <A NAME="sec:emacs-info"></A>You can start up Emacs from the command-line by typing “emacs,” or “emacs
586 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&lt;</SPAN>filename<SPAN CLASS="MATH">&gt;</SPAN>.” It can be started from the menu in some desktops, e.g., on
587 my GNOME desktop, it is under Main Menu <TT>-&gt;</TT> Programming <TT>-&gt;</TT>
588 Emacs. If you are unfamiliar with Emacs, a tutorial can be started by typing
589 “C-h t” in an Emacs window, or from the Help item in the menubar at the
590 top. Emacs makes extensive use of the Control (sometimes labelled as “CTRL”
591 or “CTL”) and Meta (sometimes labelled as “Edit” or “Alt”) keys. In
592 Emacs parlance, a hyphenated sequence, such as “C-h” means to press the
593 Control and ‘h’ key simultaneously, while “C-h t” would mean to press the
594 Control and ‘h’ key together, release them, and press the ‘t’ key. Similarly,
595 “M-x” is used to indicate that the Meta and ‘x’ keys should be pressed at
596 the same time.
597
598 <P>
599 The info browser can be started by typing “C-h i” in Emacs. The first time
600 you do this, it will briefly list some commands available inside the info
601 browser, and present you with a menu of major topics. Each menu item, or
602 cross-reference is hyperlinked to the appropriate node, and you can visit that
603 node either by moving the cursor to the item and pressing Enter, or by
604 clicking on it with the middle mouse button. To get to the <TT>gettext</TT> menu items,
605 you can either scroll down to the line,
606 <PRE>
607 * gettext: (gettext). GNU gettext utilities.
608 </PRE>
609 and visit that node. Or, as it is several pages down, you can locate it using
610 “I-search.” Type “C-s” to enter “I-search” which will then prompt you
611 for a string in the mini-buffer at the bottom of the window. This is an
612 incremental search, so that Emacs will keep moving you forward through the
613 buffer as you are entering your search string. If you have reached the last
614 occurrence of the search string in the current buffer, you will get a message
615 saying “Failing I-search: ...” on pressing “C-s.” At that point, press
616 “C-s” again to resume the search at the beginning of the buffer. Likewise,
617 “C-r” incrementally searches backwards from the present location.
618
619 <P>
620 Info nodes are listed in this document with a “::” separator, so
621 that one can go to the gettext::Creating::Header Entry:: by visiting the
622 “gettext” node from the main info menu, navigating to the “Creating”
623 node, and following that to the “Header Entry” node.
624
625 <P>
626 A stand-alone info browser, independent of Emacs, is also available on many
627 systems. Thus, the <TT>gettext</TT> info page can also be accessed by typing
628 “info gettext” in a terminal. <TT>xinfo</TT> is an X application serving as an
629 info browser, so that if it is installed, typing “xinfo gettext” from the
630 command line will open a new browser window with the <TT>gettext</TT> info page.
631
632 <P>
633
634 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00080000000000000000">
635 PO file editors</A>
636 </H1>
637 <A NAME="sec:pofile-editors"></A>While the <TT>yudit</TT> editor is adequate for our present purposes, and we are
638 planning on using that as it is platform-independent, and currently the best
639 at rendering Oriya. This section describes some features of some editors that
640 are specialized for editing PO files under Linux. This is still work in
641 progress, as I am in the process of trying out different editors before
642 settling on one. The ones considered here are: Emacs in po-mode, <TT>poedit</TT>,
643 <TT>kbabel</TT>, and <TT>gtranslator</TT>.
644
645 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00081000000000000000">
646 Emacs PO mode</A>
647 </H2>
648 Emacs should automatically enter po-mode when you load a .po file, as
649 indicated by “PO” in the modeline at the bottom. The window is made
650 read-only, so that you can edit the .po file only through special commands. A
651 description of Emacs po-mode can be found under the gettext::Basics info node,
652 or type ‘h’ or ‘?’ in a po-mode window for a list of available commands. While
653 I find Emacs po-mode quite restrictive, this is probably due to unfamiliarity
654 with it. Its main advantage is that it imposes rigid conformance to the PO
655 file format, and checks the file format when closing the .po file
656 buffer. Emacs po-mode is not useful for Oriya translation, as I know of no way
657 to directly enter Oriya text under Emacs.
658
659 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00082000000000000000">
660 poedit</A>
661 </H2>
662 XXX: in preparation.
663
664 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00083000000000000000">
665 KDE: the kbabel editor</A>
666 </H2>
667 <TT>kbabel</TT>&nbsp;[<A
668 HREF="memo.html#url:kbabel">4</A>] is a more user-friendly and configurable editor than
669 either of Emacs po-mode or <TT>poedit</TT>. It is integrated into KDE, and offers
670 extensive contextual help. Besides support for various PO file features, it
671 has a plugin framework for dictionaries, that allows consistency checks and
672 translation suggestions.
673
674 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00084000000000000000">
675 GNOME: the gtranslator editor</A>
676 </H2>
677 XXX: in preparation.
678
679 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00090000000000000000">
680 Bibliography</A>
681 </H2><DL COMPACT><DD><P></P><DT><A NAME="xkb-oriya-layout">1</A>
682 <DD>
683 G.&nbsp;Mohanty,
684 <BR>A practical primer for using Oriya under Linux, v0.3,
685 <BR><TT><A NAME="tex2html1"
686 HREF="http://oriya.sarovar.org/docs/getting_started/index.html">http://oriya.sarovar.org/docs/getting_started/index.html</A></TT>, 2004,
687 <BR>Sec.&nbsp;6.2 describes the xkb layouts for Oriya.
688
689 <P></P><DT><A NAME="url:oriya-trans-plan">2</A>
690 <DD>
691 G.&nbsp;Mohanty,
692 <BR>A plan for Oriya localization, v0.1,
693 <BR><TT><A NAME="tex2html2"
694 HREF="http://oriya.sarovar.org/docs/translation_plan/index.html">http://oriya.sarovar.org/docs/translation_plan/index.html</A></TT>,
695 2004.
696
697 <P></P><DT><A NAME="url:lj-translation">3</A>
698 <DD>
699 Linux Journal article on internationalization,
700 <BR><TT><A NAME="tex2html3"
701 HREF="https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3023">https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3023</A></TT>.
702
703 <P></P><DT><A NAME="url:kbabel">4</A>
704 <DD>
705 Features of the kbabel editor,
706 <BR><TT><A NAME="tex2html4"
707 HREF="http://i18n.kde.org/tools/kbabel/features.html">http://i18n.kde.org/tools/kbabel/features.html</A></TT>.
708 </DL>
709
710 <H1><A NAME="SECTION000100000000000000000">
711 About this document ...</A>
712 </H1>
713 <STRONG>A tutorial on Native Language Support using GNU gettext</STRONG><P>
714 This document was generated using the
715 <A HREF="http://www.latex2html.org/"><STRONG>LaTeX</STRONG>2<tt>HTML</tt></A> translator Version 2002-2-1 (1.70)
716 <P>
717 Copyright &#169; 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996,
718 <A HREF="http://cbl.leeds.ac.uk/nikos/personal.html">Nikos Drakos</A>,
719 Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
720 <BR>Copyright &#169; 1997, 1998, 1999,
721 <A HREF="http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~ross/">Ross Moore</A>,
722 Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
723 <P>
724 The command line arguments were: <BR>
725 <STRONG>latex2html</STRONG> <TT>-no_math -html_version 4.0,math,unicode,i18n,tables -split 0 memo</TT>
726 <P>
727 The translation was initiated by Gora Mohanty on 2004-07-24
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