Interest of use of GNU gettext for translation support ?

Discussion and planning of required developer support for multiple languages, and design and commentary on tools and techniques to assist with the automation of generating language specific structures.
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Melkior
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Interest of use of GNU gettext for translation support ?

Post by Melkior »

Hello,

I used to work a bit for translation on another free project, Battle for Wesnoth.
There we use Gettext for translation support.

Here are the pros for using it :
  • - Simple infra to add a new language support
    - Enable language-oriented font for special characters support (like in german, or in slave languages, like polish or russian)
    - Easy update of language translation completness when texts evolves
    - Easy status of language translation completness
Here are the cons for using it :
  • - Need to add Gettext call in every sub-program using it
    - Need to adapt development method to integrate such calls
    - Huge transition phase
Best regards,
Melkior
ace123
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Post by ace123 »

I think this is a very good idea.

However, at the moment there is so much code that it's going to take a very long time to sort through it all.

In addition, we have many different data types, including CSV (master parts list), XML (communications), Text (system files), Python (mission scripts, campaign), and C++ (everything), each of which contain a lot of text.

Some of these could be copied in their entirety into language specific directories... others might need to add gettext calls to. It's a lot of work to sort through it.
Melkior
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Post by Melkior »

I'll then try and do it for some first sentences, in my corner, to make a kind of proof of concept.

My first target will be the "Loading ..." string in the main.cpp file.
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