Re: Fwd: A system for localizing documentation strings

[Jason Rumney]

Jan Djärv wrote:
> End users don't care.  As a translator, I do care.  There are existing
> translations in gettext format I'd like to reuse if I was to translate
> Emacs.  Not sure I can take on such a huge job though :-)

As I understand it, there are several aspects to gettext.

xgettext - for extracting strings from code to be translated. This may
suit our needs if we modify it to understand certain Lisp constructs and
the doc-string C comment convention we use. Or it may be easier to
modify make-docfile to handle the doc-strings and other automatically
recognizable strings for translation, and only use xgettext for strings
in the code that need marking up. I don't think it matters which path we
choose, as either way we end up with the same set of strings to give to
translators, and either way, gettext does not suit our needs out of the
box, so the solution will be Emacs specific.

The .PO file format - This is what I think you mean when you say that
translators do care. We can support this independently of whether we use
gettext or not.

The gettext runtime API - for looking up translated strings. This is
what I mean when I say that neither end users nor translators care
whether we use it or not. It seems that the job this does is quite
simple to implement, so I don't think there is a big benefit in sticking
with it where there are obviously better ways of doing it (in the case
of doc-strings at least).