When GNU gettext will truly have reached is goal, average users
should feel some kind of astonished pleasure, seeing the effect of
that strange kind of magic that just makes their own native language
appear everywhere on their screens. As for naive users, they would
ideally have no special pleasure about it, merely taking their own
language for granted, and becoming rather unhappy otherwise.
So, let's try to describe here how we would like the magic to operate,
as we want the users' view to be the simplest, among all ways one
could look at GNU gettext. All other software engineers:
programmers, translators, maintainers, should work together in such a
way that the magic becomes possible. This is a long and progressive
undertaking, and information is available about the progress of the
GNU Translation Project.
When a package is distributed, there are two kind of users:
installers who fetch the distribution, unpack it, configure
it, compile it and install it for themselves or others to use; and
end users that call programs of the package, once these have
been installed at their site. GNU gettext is offering magic
for both installers and end users.
Languages are not equally supported in all GNU packages. To know
if some GNU package uses GNU gettext, one may check
the distribution for the `NLS' information file, for some
`ll.po' files, often kept together into some `po/'
directory, or for an `intl/' directory. Internationalized
packages have usually many `ll.po' files, where ll
represents the language. section Magic for End Users for a complete description
of the format for ll.
More generally, a matrix is available for showing the current state
of GNU internationalization, listing which packages are prepared
for multi-lingual messages, and which languages is supported by each.
Because this information changes often, this matrix is not kept within
this GNU gettext manual. This information is often found in
file `NLS' from various GNU distributions, but is also as old
as the distribution itself. A recent copy of this `NLS' file,
containing up-to-date information, should generally be found on most
GNU archive sites.
By default, packages fully using GNU gettext, internally,
are installed in such a way that they to allow translation of
messages. At configuration time, those packages should
automatically detect whether the underlying host system provides usable
catgets or gettext functions. If neither is present,
the GNU gettext library should be automatically prepared
and used. Installers may use special options at configuration
time for changing this behavior. The command `./configure
--with-gnu-gettext' bypasses system catgets or gettext to
use GNU gettext instead, while `./configure --disable-nls'
produces program totally unable to translate messages.
Internationalized packages have usually many `ll.po'
files. Unless
translations are disabled, all those available are installed together
with the package. However, the environment variable LINGUAS
may be set, prior to configuration, to limit the installed set.
LINGUAS should then contain a space separated list of two-letter
codes, stating which languages are allowed.
We consider here those packages using GNU gettext internally,
and for which the installers did not disable translation at
configure time. Then, users only have to set the LANG
environment variable to the appropriate `ll' prior to
using the programs in the package. See section The Current `NLS' Matrix for GNU. For example,
let's presume a German site. At the shell prompt, users merely have to
execute `setenv LANG de' (in csh) or `export
LANG; LANG=de' (in sh). They could even do this from their
`.login' or `.profile' file.
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