To: Deb18n
Cc: TP, Pootle
On 25/09/2006, at 5:49 PM, MJ Ray wrote:
Question raised on -l10n-esperanto recently: can gettext be used for
localising a program with a utf-8 non-English source language?
That is,
the thing in the _("...") has accents and isn't English.
I hope I expressed the question adequately. The gettext manual
seems to
stress using English everywhere, so the answer isn't clear to me. I
hope some people with relevant experience are reading -i18n.
MJ, you've had a number of replies to this on Deb18n, and I've copied
this message to the TP mailing list, where there is a lot of gettext
expertise.
If gettext isn't doing handling non-English source languages now,
it's certainly something that would be intended.
I don't know if Pootle has been used with a non-English source
language yet? Pootle devs?
My translation editor, LocFactoryEditor, allows any language for
source or destination language. Being based on XLIFF probably helps
there. But the software for extracting and replacing strings would
have to support it as well, and I think that's where we may find the
limitation still exists, if it does.
As has been pointed out, this facility is badly needed for countries
in South America, Africa and the former Soviet Union, and would
undoubtedly facilitate localization and improve its quality in many
other countries as well.
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
