On 26/09/2006, at 11:05 PM, Bruno Haible wrote:
MJ Ray asked:
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.
Technically, it is possible to use a non-English source language.
You have to be careful to
- pass --from-code=UTF-8 to xgettext when creating the PO files,
- always keep the PO files in UTF-8 encoding, never convert them to
ISO-8859-1 or so.
The bigger problem is to get translators which understand this
non-English language. Translators from, say, Spanish to Hungarian
are more difficult to find than translators from English to Hungarian.
Thanks for responding to this, Bruno. :)
It's great to know gettext can already do this: it means we can start
testing the process.
This facility is needed for the cases when translating from a non-
English language _would_ produce a better result.
For my language alone, there are many possible translators who would
work much better from Chinese or Russian to Vietnamese than from
English. It's simply a matter of which languages you have had the
opportunity to learn.
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
