Computing is usually defined as the activity of using and improving computer hardware and software. It is the computer-specific part of information technology...
In computing, internationalization and localization are means of adapting computer software to different languages, regional differences and technical requirements of a target market...
(i18n) system commonly used for writing multilingual programs on Unix-like
Unix-like
A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s. The most commonly-used implementation of gettext is GNU gettext, released by the GNU Project
GNU Project
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on September 27, 1983, by Richard Stallman at MIT. It initiated GNU operating system development in January, 1984...
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on September 27, 1983, by Richard Stallman at MIT. It initiated GNU operating system development in January, 1984...
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
implementation of the system in 1995.
Programming
Source code is first modified to use the GNU gettext calls. This is, for most programming languages, done by wrapping strings that the user will see in the gettext function. To save on typing time, and to reduce code clutter, this function is commonly aliased
Aliasing (computing)
In computing, aliasing describes a situation in which a data location in memory can be accessed through different symbolic names in the program. Thus, modifying the data through one name implicitly modifies the values associated to all aliased names, which may not be expected by the programmer...
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
In computer programming, a comment is a programming language construct used to embed programmer-readable annotations in the source code of a computer program. Those annotations are potentially significant to programmers but typically ignorable to compilers and interpreters. Comments are usually...
s (starting with ///) placed directly before strings thus marked are made available as hints to translators by helper programs.
gettext then uses the supplied strings as keys for looking up alternative translations, and will return the original string when no translation is available. This is in contrast to systems like catgets or the use of LoadString under Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
where a programmatic ID (often an integer) is used.
xgettext is run on the sources to produce a .pot file, or template, which contains a list of all the translatable strings extracted from the sources.
For example, an input file with a comment might look like:
/// TRANSLATORS: Please leave %s as it is, because it is needed by the program.
/// Thank you for contributing to this project.
printf(_("My name is %s.\n"), my_name);
xgettext is run using the command:
xgettext --add-comments=/
The resultant .pot file looks like this with the comment:
#. TRANSLATORS: Please leave %s as it is, because it is needed by the program.
#. Thank you for contributing to this project.
#: src/name.c:36
msgid "My name is %s.\n"
msgstr ""
Translating
The translator derives a .po file from the template using the msginit program, then fills out the translations. msginit initializes the translations so, for instance, for a French language translation, the command to run would be:
msginit --locale=fr --input=name.pot
This will create fr.po. The translator then edit the resultant file, either by hand or with a translation tool like Poedit
PoEdit
Poedit is a free, open source and cross-platform gettext catalog editor to aid in the process of language localisation...
Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...
with its editing mode for .po files. An edited entry will look like:
#: src/name.c:36
msgid "My name is %s.\n"
msgstr "Je m'appelle %s.\n"
Finally, the .po files are compiled into binary .mo files with msgfmt. These are now ready for distribution with the software package.
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
Environment variables are a set of dynamic named values that can affect the way running processes will behave on a computer.They can be said in some sense to create the operating environment in which a process runs...
LC_MESSAGES, and the program will display strings in the selected language, if there is an .mo file for it.
Implementations
In addition to C, GNU gettext has the following implementations: C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
Objective-C is a reflective, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language.Today, it is used primarily on Apple's Mac OS X and iOS: two environments derived from the OpenStep standard, though not compliant with it...
Object Pascal refers to a branch of object-oriented derivatives of Pascal, mostly known as the primary programming language of Embarcadero Delphi.-Early history at Apple:...
The Bourne shell, or sh, was the default Unix shell of Unix Version 7 and most Unix-like systems continue to have /bin/sh - which will be the Bourne shell, or a symbolic link or hard link to a compatible shell - even when more modern shells are used by most users.Developed by Stephen Bourne at AT&T...
Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
In computing, CLISP is an implementation of the programming language Common Lisp originally developed by Bruno Haible and Michael Stoll for the Atari ST...
Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language used by the GNU Emacs and XEmacs text editors . It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs, the remainder being written in C...
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
Haskell is a standardized, general-purpose purely functional programming language, with non-strict semantics and strong static typing. It is named after logician Haskell Curry. In Haskell, "a function is a first-class citizen" of the programming language. As a functional programming language, the...
wxWidgets is a widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces for cross-platform applications. wxWidgets enables a program's GUI code to compile and run on several computer platforms with minimal or no code changes...
(through the wxLocale class), YCP (the YaST2 language), Tcl
Tcl
Tcl is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout. Originally "born out of frustration", according to the author, with programmers devising their own languages intended to be embedded into applications, Tcl gained acceptance on its own...
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
Pike is an interpreted, general-purpose, high-level, cross-platform, dynamic programming language, with a syntax similar to that of C. Unlike many other dynamic languages, Pike is both statically and dynamically typed, and requires explicit type definitions...
Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...
gtranslator is an enhanced gettext po file editor for the GNOME desktop environment. It handles all forms of gettext po files and includes features such as Find/Replace, Translation Memory, different Translator Profiles, Messages Table , Easy Navigation and Editing of translation messages and...
Lokalize is a computer-aided translation system for translators, written from scratch using KDE Platform 4. Aside from basic editing of PO files with nifty auxiliary details, it integrates support for glossary, translation memory, diff-modes for QA, project managing, etc.- External links :* *...
The Translate Toolkit is a localization and translation toolkit. It provides a set of tools for working with localization file formats and files that might need localization. The toolkit also provides an API on which to develop other localization tools....
Virtaal is a computer-assisted translation tool written in the Python programming language. It is free software developed and maintained by Translate.org.za....
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