Re: translation of libinterp/version.cc messages

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On Sun, 2013-12-15 at 16:02 -0800, fgnievinski wrote:
> e.g., "This is free software", etc. Currently it's not supported.
> Would it be a bad idea?

There is no i18n outside of libgui right now. We would probably use
GNU gettext instead of Qt outside of libgui. We're not completely
married to the idea of using Qt, and perhaps some day we might want to
use a different GUI toolkit. Nevertheless, GNU tools like gettext are
always ok.

Translation for some things, however, is a touchy subject. I do not
know if the GPL assertion constitutes legal language. It's probably ok
to apply i18n to this message, but the text of the GPL itself must not
be translated.

There is a further complication for any i18n outside of libgui and
that is that we would probably have to drop using C++ streams, since
right now we have things such as

    ": a few Ritz values of the " << p << "-by-" <<

These are not amenable to i18n. So it's a significant amount of work,
compounded by the fact that Octave does not support any character set
other than ASCII except by accident.

It's a lot of work. You're welcome to try, and someone should do it.
Just be aware of the difficulty of the task.

- Jordi G. H.