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 forlocalising 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 tostress 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