Re: [Translation-i18n] gettext with non-en source language

[Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp>]

On 26 sept. 06, at 22:35, 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.

But even if that were the case, one would still need to translate the  
original strings to English to have access to a bigger pool of  
translators...

So one should assume that the premise for the original question is  
that they _have_ access to a number of translators from this non- 
English language.

It reminds me of the text on the GNU Gettext page:

"Usually, programs are written and documented in English, and use  
English at execution time for interacting with users." I don't know  
when this text has been written, but it clearly is not true in 2006.

Jean-Christophe Helary