1 Notes on the GNU Translation Project

GNU is going international! The GNU Translation Project is a way to get maintainers, translators, and users all together, so that GNU will gradually become able to speak many languages. A few packages already provide translations for their messages.

If you found this ‘ABOUT-NLS’ file inside a GNU distribution, you may assume that the distributed package does use GNU gettext internally, itself available at your nearest GNU archive site. But you do not need to install GNU gettext prior to configuring, installing or using this package with messages translated.

Installers will find here some useful hints. These notes also explain how users should proceed for getting the programs to use the available translations. They tell how people wanting to contribute and work at translations should contact the appropriate team.

When reporting bugs in the ‘intl/’ directory or bugs which may be related to internationalization, you should tell about the version of gettext which is used. The information can be found in the ‘intl/VERSION’ file, in internationalized packages.

1.1 One advise in advance

If you want to exploit the full power of internationalization, you should configure it using

./configure --with-included-gettext

to force usage of internationalizing routines provided within this package, despite the existence of internationalizing capabilities in the operating system where this package is being installed. So far, no prior implementation provides as many useful features (such as locale alias or message inheritance). It is also not possible to offer this additional functionality on top of a catgets implementation. Future versions of GNU gettext will very likely convey even more functionality. So it might be a good idea to change to GNU gettext as soon as possible.

1.2 INSTALL Matters

Some GNU packages are localizable when properly installed; the programs they contain can be made to speak your own native language. Most such packages use GNU gettext. Other packages have their own ways to internationalization, predating GNU gettext.

By default, this package will be installed to allow translation of messages. It will automatically detect whether the system provides usable catgets (if using this is selected by the installer) or gettext functions. If neither is available, the GNU gettext own library will be used. This library is wholly contained within this package, usually in the ‘intl/’ subdirectory, so prior installation of the GNU gettext package is not required. Installers may use special options at configuration time for changing the default behaviour. The commands:

./configure --with-included-gettext
./configure --with-catgets
./configure --disable-nls

will respectively bypass any pre-existing catgets or gettext to use the internationalizing routines provided within this package, enable the use of the catgets functions (if found on the locale system), or else, totally disable translation of messages.

When you already have GNU gettext installed on your system and run configure without an option for your new package, configure will probably detect the previously built and installed ‘libintl.a’ file and will decide to use this. This might be not what is desirable. You should use the more recent version of the GNU gettext library. I.e. if the file ‘intl/VERSION’ shows that the library which comes with this package is more recent, you should use

./configure --with-included-gettext

to prevent auto-detection.

By default the configuration process will not test for the catgets function and therefore they will not be used. The reasons are already given above: the emulation on top of catgets cannot provide all the extensions provided by the GNU gettext library. If you nevertheless want to use the catgets functions use

./configure --with-catgets

to enable the test for catgets (this causes no harm if catgets is not available on your system). If you really select this option we would like to hear about the reasons because we cannot think of any good one ourself.

Internationalized packages have usually many ‘po/ll.po’ files, where ll gives an ISO 639 two-letter code identifying the language. Unless translations have been forbidden at configure time by using the ‘--disable-nls’ switch, all available translations 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.

1.3 Using This Package

As a user, if your language has been installed for this package, you only have to set the LANG environment variable to the appropriate ISO 639 ‘ll’ two-letter code prior to using the programs in the package. For example, let’s suppose that you speak German. At the shell prompt, merely execute ‘setenv LANG de’ (in csh), ‘export LANG; LANG=de’ (in sh) or ‘export LANG=de’ (in bash). This can be done from your ‘.login’ or ‘.profile’ file, once and for all.

An operating system might already offer message localization for many of its programs, while other programs (whether GNU or not) have been installed locally with the full capabilities of GNU gettext. Just using gettext extended syntax for LANG would break proper localization of already available operating system programs. In this case, users should set both LANGUAGE and LANG variables in their environment, as programs using GNU gettext give preference to LANGUAGE. For example, some Swedish users would rather read translations in German than English for when Swedish is not available. This is easily accomplished by setting LANGUAGE to ‘sv:de’ while leaving LANG to ‘sv’.

1.4 Translating Teams

For the GNU Translation Project to be a success, we need interested people who like their own language and write it well, and who are also able to synergize with other translators speaking the same language. Each translation team has its own mailing list, courtesy of Linux International. You may reach your translation team at the address ‘ll@li.org’, replacing ll by the two-letter ISO 639 code for your language. Language codes are not the same as the country codes given in ISO 3166. The following translation teams exist, as of August 1996:

Arabic ar, Chinese zh, Czech cs, Danish da, Dutch nl, English en, Esperanto eo, Finnish fi, French fr, German de, Greek el, Hebrew he, Hungarian hu, Irish ga, Italian it, Indonesian id, Japanese ja, Korean ko, Latin la, Norwegian no, Persian fa, Polish pl, Portuguese pt, Russian ru, Slovenian sl, Spanish es, Swedish sv, Telugu te, Turkish tr and Ukrainian uk.

For example, you may reach the Chinese translation team by writing to ‘zh@li.org’.

If you’d like to volunteer to work at translating messages, you should become a member of the translating team for your own language. The subscribing address is not the same as the list itself, it has ‘-request’ appended. For example, speakers of Swedish can send a message to ‘sv-request@li.org’, having this message body:

subscribe

Keep in mind that team members are expected to participate actively in translations, or at solving translational difficulties, rather than merely lurking around. If your team does not exist yet and you want to start one, or if you are unsure about what to do or how to get started, please write to ‘gnu-translation@gnu.ai.mit.edu’ to reach the GNU coordinator for all translator teams.

The English team is special. It works at improving and uniformizing the terminology used in GNU. Proven linguistic skill are praised more than programming skill, here. For the time being, please avoid subscribing to the English team unless explicitly invited to do so.

1.5 Available Packages

Languages are not equally supported in all GNU packages. The following matrix shows the current state of GNU internationalization, as of August 1996. The matrix shows, in regard of each package, for which languages PO files have been submitted to translation coordination.

Some counters in the preceding matrix are higher than the number of visible blocks let us expect. This is because a few extra PO files are used for implementing regional variants of languages, or language dialects.

For a PO file in the matrix above to be effective, the package to which it applies should also have been internationalized and distributed as such by its maintainer. There might be an observable lag between the mere existence a PO file and its wide availability in a GNU distribution.

If August 1996 seems to be old, you may fetch a more recent copy of this ‘ABOUT-NLS’ file on most GNU archive sites.

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