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

[Clytie Siddall <clytie@riverland.net.au>]

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