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  41
  42 <H1 ALIGN="CENTER">A tutorial on Native Language Support using GNU gettext</H1><DIV CLASS="author_info">
  43
  44 <P ALIGN="CENTER"><STRONG>G.&nbsp;Mohanty</STRONG></P>
  45 <P ALIGN="CENTER"><STRONG>Revision 0.3: 24 July 2004</STRONG></P>
  46 </DIV>
  47
  48 <H3>Abstract:</H3>
  49 <DIV CLASS="ABSTRACT">
  50   The use of the GNU <TT>gettext</TT> utilities to implement support for native
  51 languages is described here. Though, the language to be supported is
  52 considered to be Oriya, the method is generally applicable. Likewise, while
  53 Linux was used as the platform here, any system using GNU <TT>gettext</TT> should work
  54 in a similar fashion.
  55
  56 <P>
  57 We go through a step-by-step description of how to make on-screen messages
  58 from a toy program to appear in Oriya instead of English; starting from the
  59 programming and ending with the user's viewpoint. Some discussion is also made
  60 of how to go about the task of translation.
  61 </DIV>
  62 <P>
  63 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00010000000000000000">
  64 Introduction</A>
  65 </H1>
  66 Currently, both commercial and free computer software is typically written and
  67 documented in English. Till recently, little effort was expended towards
  68 allowing them to interact with the user in languages other than English, thus
  69 leaving the non-English speaking world at a disadvantage. However, that
  70 changed with the release of the GNU <TT>gettext</TT> utilities, and nowadays most GNU
  71 programs are written within a framework that allows easy translation of the
  72 program message to languages other than English. Provided that translations
  73 are available, the language used by the program to interact with the user can
  74 be set at the time of running it. <TT>gettext</TT> manages to achieve this seemingly
  75 miraculous task in a manner that simplifies the work of both the programmer
  76 and the translator, and, more importantly, allows them to work independently
  77 of each other.
  78
  79 <P>
  80 This article describes how to support native languages under a system using
  81 the GNU <TT>gettext</TT> utilities. While it should be applicable to other versions of
  82 <TT>gettext</TT>, the one actually used for the examples here is version
  83 0.12.1. Another system, called <TT>catgets</TT>, described in the X/Open
  84 Portability Guide, is also in use, but we shall not discuss that here.
  85
  86 <P>
  87
  88 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00020000000000000000">
  89 A simple example</A>
  90 </H1>
  91 <A NAME="sec:simple"></A>Our first example of using <TT>gettext</TT> will be the good old Hello World program,
  92 whose sole function is to print the phrase ``Hello, world!'' to the terminal.
  93 The internationalized version of this program might be saved in hello.c as:
  94 <PRE>
  95 1    #include &lt;libintl.h&gt;
  96 2    #include &lt;locale.h&gt;
  97 3    #include &lt;stdio.h&gt;
  98 4    #include &lt;stdlib.h&gt;
  99 5    int main(void)
 100 6    {
 101 7      setlocale( LC_ALL, "" );
 102 8      bindtextdomain( "hello", "/usr/share/locale" );
 103 9      textdomain( "hello" );
 104 10      printf( gettext( "Hello, world!\n" ) );
 105 11      exit(0);
 106 12    }
 107 </PRE>
 108 Of course, a real program would check the return values of the functions and
 109 try to deal with any errors, but we have omitted that part of the code for
 110 clarity. Compile as usual with <TT>gcc -o hello hello.c</TT>. The program should
 111 be linked to the GNU libintl library, but as this is part of the GNU C
 112 library, this is done automatically for you under Linux, and other systems
 113 using glibc.
 114
 115 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00021000000000000000">
 116 The programmer's viewpoint</A>
 117 </H2>
 118    As expected, when the <TT>hello</TT> executable is run under the default locale
 119 (usually the C locale) it prints ``Hello, world!'' in the terminal. Besides
 120 some initial setup work, the only additional burden faced by the programmer is
 121 to replace any string to be printed with <TT>gettext(string)</TT>, i.e., to
 122 instead pass the string as an argument to the <TT>gettext</TT> function. For lazy
 123 people like myself, the amount of extra typing can be reduced even further by
 124 a CPP macro, e.g., put this at the beginning of the source code file,
 125 <PRE>
 126   #define _(STRING)    gettext(STRING)
 127 </PRE>
 128 and then use <TT>_(string)</TT> instead of <TT>gettext(string)</TT>.
 129
 130 <P>
 131 Let us dissect the program line-by-line.
 132
 133 <OL>
 134 <LI><TT>locale.h</TT> defines C data structures used to hold locale
 135   information, and is needed by the <TT>setlocale</TT> function. <TT>libintl.h</TT>
 136   prototypes the GNU text utilities functions, and is needed here by
 137   <TT>bindtextdomain</TT>, <TT>gettext</TT>, and <TT>textdomain</TT>.
 138 </LI>
 139 <LI>The call to <TT>setlocale</TT> () on line 7, with LC_ALL as the first argument
 140   and an empty string as the second one, initializes the entire current locale
 141   of the program as per environment variables set by the user. In other words,
 142   the program locale is initialized to match that of the user. For details see
 143   ``man <TT>setlocale</TT>.''
 144 </LI>
 145 <LI>The <TT>bindtextdomain</TT> function on line 8 sets the base directory for the
 146   message catalogs for a given message domain. A message domain is a set of
 147   translatable messages, with every software package typically having its own
 148   domain. Here, we have used ``hello'' as the name of the message domain for
 149   our toy program. As the second argument, /usr/share/locale, is the default
 150   system location for message catalogs, what we are saying here is that we are
 151   going to place the message catalog in the default system directory. Thus, we
 152   could have dispensed with the call to <TT>bindtextdomain</TT> here, and this
 153   function is useful only if the message catalogs are installed in a
 154   non-standard place, e.g., a packaged software distribution might have
 155   the catalogs under a po/ directory under its own main directory. See ``man
 156   <TT>bindtextdomain</TT>'' for details.
 157 </LI>
 158 <LI>The <TT>textdomain</TT> call on line 9 sets the message domain of the current
 159   program to ``hello,'' i.e., the name that we are using for our example
 160   program. ``man textdomain'' will give usage details for the function.
 161 </LI>
 162 <LI>Finally, on line 10, we have replaced what would normally have been,
 163 <PRE>
 164   printf( "Hello, world!\n" );
 165 </PRE>
 166 with,
 167 <PRE>
 168   printf( gettext( "Hello, world!\n" ) );
 169 </PRE>
 170 (If you are unfamiliar with C, the <!-- MATH
 171  $\backslash$
 172  -->
 173 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>n at the end of the string
 174 produces a newline at the end of the output.) This simple modification to all
 175 translatable strings allows the translator to work independently from the
 176 programmer. <TT>gettextize</TT> eases the task of the programmer in adapting a
 177 package to use GNU <TT>gettext</TT> for the first time, or to upgrade to a newer
 178 version of <TT>gettext</TT>.
 179 </LI>
 180 </OL>
 181
 182 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00022000000000000000">
 183 Extracting translatable strings</A>
 184 </H2>
 185   Now, it is time to extract the strings to be translated from the program
 186 source code. This is achieved with <TT>xgettext</TT>, which can be invoked as follows:
 187 <PRE><FONT color="red">
 188   xgettext -d hello -o hello.pot hello.c
 189 </FONT></PRE>
 190 This processes the source code in hello.c, saving the output in hello.pot (the
 191 argument to the -o option).
 192 The message domain for the program should be specified as the argument
 193 to the -d option, and should match the domain specified in the call to
 194 <TT>textdomain</TT> (on line 9 of the program source). Other details on how to use
 195 <TT>gettext</TT> can be found from ``man gettext.''
 196
 197 <P>
 198 A .pot (portable object template) file is used as the basis for translating
 199 program messages into any language. To start translation, one can simply copy
 200 hello.pot to oriya.po (this preserves the template file for later translation
 201 into a different language). However, the preferred way to do this is by
 202 use of the <TT>msginit</TT> program, which takes care of correctly setting up some
 203 default values,
 204 <PRE><FONT color="red">
 205   msginit -l or_IN -o oriya.po -i hello.pot
 206 </FONT></PRE>
 207 Here, the -l option defines the locale (an Oriya locale should have been
 208 installed on your system), and the -i and -o options define the input and
 209 output files, respectively. If there is only a single .pot file in the
 210 directory, it will be used as the input file, and the -i option can be
 211 omitted.  For me, the oriya.po file produced by <TT>msginit</TT> would look like:
 212 <PRE>
 213   # Oriya translations for PACKAGE package.
 214   # Copyright (C) 2004 THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
 215   # This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
 216   # Gora Mohanty &lt;gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in&gt;, 2004.
 217   #
 218   msgid ""
 219   msgstr ""
 220   "Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
 221   "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
 222   "POT-Creation-Date: 2004-06-22 02:22+0530\n"
 223   "PO-Revision-Date: 2004-06-22 02:38+0530\n"
 224   "Last-Translator: Gora Mohanty &lt;gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in&gt;\n"
 225   "Language-Team: Oriya\n"
 226   "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
 227   "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
 228   "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
 229
 230   #: hello.c:10
 231   msgid "Hello, world!\n"
 232   msgstr ""
 233 </PRE>
 234 <TT>msginit</TT> prompted for my email address, and probably obtained my real name
 235 from the system password file. It also filled in values such as the revision
 236 date, language, character set, presumably using information from the or_IN
 237 locale.
 238
 239 <P>
 240 It is important to respect the format of the entries in the .po (portable
 241 object) file. Each entry has the following structure:
 242 <PRE>
 243   WHITE-SPACE
 244   #  TRANSLATOR-COMMENTS
 245   #. AUTOMATIC-COMMENTS
 246   #: REFERENCE...
 247   #, FLAG...
 248   msgid UNTRANSLATED-STRING
 249   msgstr TRANSLATED-STRING
 250 </PRE>
 251 where, the initial white-space (spaces, tabs, newlines,...), and all
 252 comments might or might not exist for a particular entry. Comment lines start
 253 with a '#' as the first character, and there are two kinds: (i) manually
 254 added translator comments, that have some white-space immediately following the
 255 '#,' and (ii) automatic comments added and maintained by the <TT>gettext</TT> tools,
 256 with a non-white-space character after the '#.' The <TT>msgid</TT> line contains
 257 the untranslated (English) string, if there is one for that PO file entry, and
 258 the <TT>msgstr</TT> line is where the translated string is to be entered. More on
 259 this later. For details on the format of PO files see gettext::Basics::PO
 260 Files:: in the Emacs info-browser (see Appdx.&nbsp;<A HREF="#sec:emacs-info">A</A> for an
 261 introduction to using the info-browser in Emacs).
 262
 263 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00023000000000000000">
 264 Making translations</A>
 265 </H2>
 266   The oriya.po file can then be edited to add the translated Oriya
 267 strings. While the editing can be carried out in any editor if one is careful
 268 to follow the PO file format, there are several editors that ease the task of
 269 editing PO files, among them being po-mode in Emacs, <TT>kbabel</TT>, gtranslator,
 270 poedit, etc. Appdx.&nbsp;<A HREF="#sec:pofile-editors">B</A> describes features of some of
 271 these editors.
 272
 273 <P>
 274 The first thing to do is fill in the comments at the beginning and the header
 275 entry, parts of which have already been filled in by <TT>msginit</TT>. The lines in
 276 the header entry are pretty much self-explanatory, and details can be found in
 277 the gettext::Creating::Header Entry:: info node. After that, the remaining
 278 work consists of typing the Oriya text that is to serve as translations for
 279 the corresponding English string. For the <TT>msgstr</TT> line in each of the
 280 remaining entries, add the translated Oriya text between the double quotes;
 281 the translation corresponding to the English phrase in the <TT>msgid</TT> string
 282 for the entry. For example, for the phrase ``Hello world!<!-- MATH
 283  $\backslash$
 284  -->
 285 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>n'' in
 286 oriya.po, we could enter ``&#x0b28;&#x0b2e;&#x0b38;&#x0b4d;&#x0b15;&#x0b3e;&#x0b30;<!-- MATH
 287  $\backslash$
 288  -->
 289 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>n''. The final
 290 oriya.po file might look like:
 291 <PRE>
 292   # Oriya translations for hello example package.
 293   # Copyright (C) 2004 Gora Mohanty
 294   # This file is distributed under the same license as the hello example package.
 295   # Gora Mohanty &lt;gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in&gt;, 2004.
 296   #
 297   msgid ""
 298   msgstr ""
 299   "Project-Id-Version: oriya\n"
 300   "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
 301   "POT-Creation-Date: 2004-06-22 02:22+0530\n"
 302   "PO-Revision-Date: 2004-06-22 10:54+0530\n"
 303   "Last-Translator: Gora Mohanty &lt;gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in&gt;\n"
 304   "Language-Team: Oriya\n"
 305   "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
 306   "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
 307   "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
 308   "X-Generator: KBabel 1.3\n"
 309
 310   #: hello.c:10
 311   msgid "Hello, world!\n"
 312   msgstr "&#x0b28;&#x0b2e;&#x0b38;&#x0b4d;&#x0b15;&#x0b3e;&#x0b30;\n"
 313 </PRE>
 314
 315 <P>
 316 For editing PO files, I have found the <TT>kbabel</TT> editor suits me the best. The
 317 only problem is that while Oriya text can be entered directly into <TT>kbabel</TT>
 318 using the xkb Oriya keyboard layouts&nbsp;[<A
 319  HREF="memo.html#xkb-oriya-layout">1</A>] and the entries
 320 are saved properly, the text is not displayed correctly in the <TT>kbabel</TT> window
 321 if it includes conjuncts. Emacs po-mode is a little restrictive, but strictly
 322 enforces conformance with the PO file format. The main problem with it is that
 323 it does not seem currently possible to edit Oriya text in Emacs. <TT>yudit</TT>
 324 is the best at editing Oriya text, but does not ensure that the PO file format
 325 is followed. You can play around a bit with these editors to find one that
 326 suits your personal preferences. One possibility might be to first edit the
 327 header entry with <TT>kbabel</TT> or Emacs po-mode, and then use <TT>yudit</TT> to enter
 328 the Oriya text on the <TT>msgstr</TT> lines.
 329
 330 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00024000000000000000">
 331 Message catalogs</A>
 332 </H2>
 333   <A NAME="sec:catalog"></A>After completing the translations in the oriya.po file, it must be compiled to
 334 a binary format that can be quickly loaded by the <TT>gettext</TT> tools. To do that,
 335 use:
 336 <PRE><FONT color="red">
 337   msgfmt -c -v -o hello.mo oriya.po
 338 </FONT></PRE>
 339 The -c option does detailed checking of the PO file format, -v makes the
 340 program verbose, and the output filename is given by the argument to the -o
 341 option. Note that the base of the output filename should match the message
 342 domain given in the first arguments to <TT>bindtextdomain</TT> and <TT>textdomain</TT> on
 343 lines 8 and 9 of the example program in Sec.&nbsp;<A HREF="#sec:simple">2</A>. The .mo
 344 (machine object) file should be stored in the location whose base directory is
 345 given by the second argument to <TT>bindtextdomain</TT>. The final location of the
 346 file will be in the sub-directory LL/LC_MESSAGES or LL_CC/LC_MESSAGES under
 347 the base directory, where LL stands for a language, and CC for a country. For
 348 example, as we have chosen the standard location, /usr/share/locale, for our
 349 base directory, and for us the language and country strings are ``or'' and
 350 ``IN,'' respectively, we will place hello.mo in /usr/share/locale/or_IN. Note
 351 that you will need super-user privilege to copy hello.mo to this system
 352 directory. Thus,
 353 <PRE><FONT color="red">
 354   mkdir -p /usr/share/locale/or_IN/LC_MESSAGES
 355   cp hello.mo /usr/share/locale/or_IN/LC_MESSAGES
 356 </FONT></PRE>
 357
 358 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00025000000000000000">
 359 The user's viewpoint</A>
 360 </H2>
 361   Once the message catalogs have been properly installed, any user on the system
 362 can use the Oriya version of the Hello World program, provided an Oriya locale
 363 is available. First, change your locale with,
 364 <PRE><FONT color="red">
 365   echo $LANG
 366   export LANG=or_IN
 367 </FONT></PRE>
 368 The first statement shows you the current setting of your locale (this is
 369 usually en_US, and you will need it to reset the default locale at the end),
 370 while the second one sets it to an Oriya locale.
 371
 372 <P>
 373 A Unicode-capable terminal emulator is needed to view Oriya output
 374 directly. The new versions of both gnome-terminal and konsole (the KDE
 375 terminal emulator) are Unicode-aware. I will focus on gnome-terminal as it
 376 seems to have better support for internationalization. gnome-terminal needs to
 377 be told that the bytes arriving are UTF-8 encoded multibyte sequences. This
 378 can be done by (a) choosing Terminal <TT>-&gt;</TT> Character Coding <TT>-&gt;</TT>
 379 Unicode (UTF-8), or (b) typing ``/bin/echo -n -e
 380 '<!-- MATH
 381  $\backslash$
 382  -->
 383 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>033%<!-- MATH
 384  $\backslash$
 385  -->
 386 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>G''' in the terminal, or (c) by running
 387 /bin/unicode_start. Likewise, you can revert to the default locale by (a)
 388 choosing Terminal <TT>-&gt;</TT> Character Coding <TT>-&gt;</TT> Current Locale
 389 (ISO-8859-1), or (b) ``/bin/echo -n -e '<!-- MATH
 390  $\backslash$
 391  -->
 392 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>033%<!-- MATH
 393  $\backslash$
 394  -->
 395 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&#92;</SPAN>@','' or
 396 (c) by running /bin/unicode_stop. Now, running the example program (after
 397 compiling with gcc as described in Sec.&nbsp;<A HREF="#sec:simple">2</A>) with,
 398 <PRE><FONT color="red">
 399   ./hello
 400 </FONT></PRE>
 401 should give you output in Oriya. Please note that conjuncts will most likely
 402 be displayed with a ``halant'' as the terminal probably does not render Indian
 403 language fonts correctly. Also, as most terminal emulators assume fixed-width
 404 fonts, the results are hardly likely to be aesthetically appealing.
 405
 406 <P>
 407 An alternative is to save the program output in a file, and view it with
 408 <TT>yudit</TT> which will render the glyphs correctly. Thus,
 409 <PRE><FONT color="red">
 410   ./hello &gt; junk
 411   yudit junk
 412 </FONT></PRE>
 413 Do not forget to reset the locale before resuming usual work in the
 414 terminal. Else, your English characters might look funny.
 415
 416 <P>
 417 While all this should give the average user some pleasure in being able to see
 418 Oriya output from a program without a whole lot of work, it should be kept in
 419 mind that we are still far from our desired goal. Hopefully, one day the
 420 situation will be such that rather than deriving special pleasure from it,
 421 users take it for granted that Oriya should be available and are upset
 422 otherwise.
 423
 424 <P>
 425
 426 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00030000000000000000">
 427 Adding complications: program upgrade</A>
 428 </H1>
 429 The previous section presented a simple example of how Oriya language support
 430 could be added to a C program. Like all programs, we might now wish to further
 431 enhance it. For example, we could include a greeting to the user by adding
 432 another <TT>printf</TT> statement after the first one. Our new hello.c source
 433 code might look like this:
 434 <PRE>
 435 1    #include &lt;libintl.h&gt;
 436 2    #include &lt;locale.h&gt;
 437 3    #include &lt;stdio.h&gt;
 438 4    #include &lt;stdlib.h&gt;
 439 5    int main(void)
 440 6    {
 441 7      setlocale( LC_ALL, "" );
 442 8      bindtextdomain( "hello", "/usr/share/locale" );
 443 9      textdomain( "hello" );
 444 10      printf( gettext( "Hello, world!\n" ) );
 445 11      printf( gettext( "How are you\n" ) );
 446 12      exit(0);
 447 13    }
 448 </PRE>
 449 For such a small change, it would be simple enough to just repeat the above
 450 cycle of extracting the relevant English text, translating it to Oriya, and
 451 preparing a new message catalog. We can even simplify the work by cutting and
 452 pasting most of the old oriya.po file into the new one. However, real programs
 453 will have thousands of such strings, and we would like to be able to translate
 454 only the changed strings, and have the <TT>gettext</TT> utilities handle the drudgery
 455 of combining the new translations with the old ones. This is indeed possible.
 456
 457 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00031000000000000000">
 458 Merging old and new translations</A>
 459 </H2>
 460   As before, extract the translatable strings from hello.c to a new portable
 461 object template file, hello-new.pot, using <TT>xgettext</TT>,
 462 <PRE><FONT color="red">
 463   xgettext -d hello -o hello-new.pot hello.c
 464 </FONT></PRE>
 465 Now, we use a new program, <TT>msgmerge</TT>, to merge the existing .po file with
 466 translations into the new template file, viz.,
 467 <PRE><FONT color="red">
 468   msgmerge -U oriya.po hello-new.pot
 469 </FONT></PRE>
 470 The -U option updates the existing
 471 .po file, oriya.po. We could have chosen to instead create a new .po file by
 472 using ``-o <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&lt;</SPAN>filename<SPAN CLASS="MATH">&gt;</SPAN>'' instead of -U. The updated .po file will still
 473 have the old translations embedded in it, and new entries with untranslated
 474 <TT>msgid</TT> lines. For us, the new lines in oriya.po will look like,
 475 <PRE>
 476   #: hello.c:11
 477   msgid "How are you?\n"
 478   msgstr ""
 479 </PRE>
 480 For the new translation, we could use, ``&#x0b06;&#x0b2a;&#x0b23;
 481 &#x0b15;&#x0b3f;&#x0b2a;&#x0b30;&#x0b3f; &#x0b05;&#x0b1b;&#x0b28;&#x0b4d;&#x0b24;&#x0b3f;?'' in
 482 place of the English phrase ``How are you?'' The updated oriya.po file,
 483 including the translation might look like:
 484 <PRE>
 485   # Oriya translations for hello example package.
 486   # Copyright (C) 2004 Gora Mohanty
 487   # This file is distributed under the same license as the hello examplepackage.
 488   # Gora Mohanty &lt;gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in&gt;, 2004.
 489   #
 490   msgid ""
 491   msgstr ""
 492   "Project-Id-Version: oriya\n"
 493   "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
 494   "POT-Creation-Date: 2004-06-23 14:30+0530\n"
 495   "PO-Revision-Date: 2004-06-22 10:54+0530\n"
 496   "Last-Translator: Gora Mohanty &lt;gora_mohanty@yahoo.co.in&gt;\n"
 497   "Language-Team: Oriya\n"
 498   "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
 499   "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
 500   "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
 501   "X-Generator: KBabel 1.3\n"
 502
 503   #: hello.c:10
 504   msgid "Hello, world!\n"
 505   msgstr "&#x0b28;&#x0b2e;&#x0b38;&#x0b4d;&#x0b15;&#x0b3e;&#x0b30;\n"
 506
 507   #: hello.c:11
 508   msgid "How are you?\n"
 509   msgstr "&#x0b06;&#x0b2a;&#x0b23; &#x0b15;&#x0b3f;&#x0b2a;&#x0b30;&#x0b3f; &#x0b05;&#x0b1b;&#x0b28;&#x0b4d;&#x0b24;&#x0b3f;?\n"
 510 </PRE>
 511
 512 <P>
 513 Compile oriya.po to a machine object file, and install in the appropriate
 514 place as in Sec.&nbsp;<A HREF="#sec:catalog">2.4</A>. Thus,
 515 <PRE><FONT color="red">
 516   msgfmt -c -v -o hello.mo oriya.po
 517   mkdir -p /usr/share/locale/or_IN/LC_MESSAGES
 518   cp hello.mo /usr/share/locale/or_IN/LC_MESSAGES
 519 </FONT></PRE>
 520 You can test the Oriya output as above, after recompiling hello.c and running
 521 it in an Oriya locale.
 522
 523 <P>
 524
 525 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00040000000000000000">
 526 More about <TT>gettext</TT> </A>
 527 </H1>
 528 The GNU <TT>gettext</TT> info pages provide a well-organized and complete description
 529 of the <TT>gettext</TT> utilities and their usage for enabling Native Language
 530 Support. One should, at the very least, read the introductory material at
 531 gettext::Introduction::, and the suggested references in
 532 gettext::Conclusion::References::. Besides the <TT>gettext</TT> utilities described in
 533 this document, various other programs to manipulate .po files are discussed in
 534 gettext:Manipulating::. Finally, support for programming languages other than
 535 C/C++ is discussed in gettext::Programming Languages::.
 536
 537 <P>
 538
 539 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00050000000000000000">
 540 The work of translation</A>
 541 </H1>
 542   Besides the obvious program message strings that have been the sole focus of
 543 our discussion here, there are many other things that require translation,
 544 including GUI messages, command-line option strings, configuration files,
 545 program documentation, etc. Besides these obvious aspects, there are a
 546 significant number of programs and/or scripts that are automatically generated
 547 by other programs. These generated programs might also themselves require
 548 translation. So, in any effort to provide support for a given native language,
 549 carrying out the translation and keeping up with program updates becomes a
 550 major part of the undertaking, requiring a continuing commitment from the
 551 language team. A plan has been outlined for the Oriya localization
 552 project&nbsp;[<A
 553  HREF="memo.html#url:oriya-trans-plan">2</A>].
 554
 555 <P>
 556
 557 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00060000000000000000">
 558 Acknowledgments</A>
 559 </H1>
 560 Extensive use has obviously been made of the GNU <TT>gettext</TT> manual in preparing
 561 this document. I have also been helped by an article in the Linux
 562 Journal&nbsp;[<A
 563  HREF="memo.html#url:lj-translation">3</A>].
 564
 565 <P>
 566 This work is part of the project for enabling the use of Oriya under Linux. I
 567 thank my uncle, N.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;Pattnaik, for conceiving of the project. We have all
 568 benefited from the discussions amidst the group of people working on this
 569 project. On the particular issue of translation, the help of H.&nbsp;R.&nbsp;Pansari,
 570 A.&nbsp;Nayak, and M.&nbsp;Chand is much appreciated.
 571
 572 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00070000000000000000">
 573 The Emacs info browser</A>
 574 </H1>
 575 <A NAME="sec:emacs-info"></A>You can start up Emacs from the command-line by typing ``emacs,'' or ``emacs
 576 <SPAN CLASS="MATH">&lt;</SPAN>filename<SPAN CLASS="MATH">&gt;</SPAN>.'' It can be started from the menu in some desktops, e.g., on
 577 my GNOME desktop, it is under Main Menu <TT>-&gt;</TT> Programming <TT>-&gt;</TT>
 578 Emacs. If you are unfamiliar with Emacs, a tutorial can be started by typing
 579 ``C-h t'' in an Emacs window, or from the Help item in the menubar at the
 580 top. Emacs makes extensive use of the Control (sometimes labelled as ``CTRL''
 581 or ``CTL'') and Meta (sometimes labelled as ``Edit'' or ``Alt'') keys. In
 582 Emacs parlance, a hyphenated sequence, such as ``C-h'' means to press the
 583 Control and `h' key simultaneously, while ``C-h t'' would mean to press the
 584 Control and `h' key together, release them, and press the `t' key. Similarly,
 585 ``M-x'' is used to indicate that the Meta and `x' keys should be pressed at
 586 the same time.
 587
 588 <P>
 589 The info browser can be started by typing ``C-h i'' in Emacs. The first time
 590 you do this, it will briefly list some commands available inside the info
 591 browser, and present you with a menu of major topics. Each menu item, or
 592 cross-reference is hyperlinked to the appropriate node, and you can visit that
 593 node either by moving the cursor to the item and pressing Enter, or by
 594 clicking on it with the middle mouse button. To get to the <TT>gettext</TT> menu items,
 595 you can either scroll down to the line,
 596 <PRE>
 597   * gettext: (gettext).                          GNU gettext utilities.
 598 </PRE>
 599 and visit that node. Or, as it is several pages down, you can locate it using
 600 ``I-search.'' Type ``C-s'' to enter ``I-search'' which will then prompt you
 601 for a string in the mini-buffer at the bottom of the window. This is an
 602 incremental search, so that Emacs will keep moving you forward through the
 603 buffer as you are entering your search string. If you have reached the last
 604 occurrence of the search string in the current buffer, you will get a message
 605 saying ``Failing I-search: ...'' on pressing ``C-s.'' At that point, press
 606 ``C-s'' again to resume the search at the beginning of the buffer. Likewise,
 607 ``C-r'' incrementally searches backwards from the present location.
 608
 609 <P>
 610 Info nodes are listed in this document with a ``::'' separator, so
 611 that one can go to the gettext::Creating::Header Entry:: by visiting the
 612 ``gettext'' node from the main info menu, navigating to the ``Creating''
 613 node, and following that to the ``Header Entry'' node.
 614
 615 <P>
 616 A stand-alone info browser, independent of Emacs, is also available on many
 617 systems. Thus, the <TT>gettext</TT> info page can also be accessed by typing
 618 ``info gettext'' in a terminal. <TT>xinfo</TT> is an X application serving as an
 619 info browser, so that if it is installed, typing ``xinfo gettext'' from the
 620 command line will open a new browser window with the <TT>gettext</TT> info page.
 621
 622 <P>
 623
 624 <H1><A NAME="SECTION00080000000000000000">
 625 PO file editors</A>
 626 </H1>
 627 <A NAME="sec:pofile-editors"></A>While the <TT>yudit</TT> editor is adequate for our present purposes, and we are
 628 planning on using that as it is platform-independent, and currently the best
 629 at rendering Oriya. This section describes some features of some editors that
 630 are specialized for editing PO files under Linux. This is still work in
 631 progress, as I am in the process of trying out different editors before
 632 settling on one. The ones considered here are: Emacs in po-mode, <TT>poedit</TT>,
 633 <TT>kbabel</TT>, and <TT>gtranslator</TT>.
 634
 635 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00081000000000000000">
 636 Emacs PO mode</A>
 637 </H2>
 638   Emacs should automatically enter po-mode when you load a .po file, as
 639 indicated by ``PO'' in the modeline at the bottom. The window is made
 640 read-only, so that you can edit the .po file only through special commands.  A
 641 description of Emacs po-mode can be found under the gettext::Basics info node,
 642 or type `h' or `?' in a po-mode window for a list of available commands. While
 643 I find Emacs po-mode quite restrictive, this is probably due to unfamiliarity
 644 with it. Its main advantage is that it imposes rigid conformance to the PO
 645 file format, and checks the file format when closing the .po file
 646 buffer. Emacs po-mode is not useful for Oriya translation, as I know of no way
 647 to directly enter Oriya text under Emacs.
 648
 649 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00082000000000000000">
 650 poedit</A>
 651 </H2>
 652   XXX: in preparation.
 653
 654 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00083000000000000000">
 655 KDE: the kbabel editor</A>
 656 </H2>
 657   <TT>kbabel</TT>&nbsp;[<A
 658  HREF="memo.html#url:kbabel">4</A>] is a more user-friendly and configurable editor than
 659 either of Emacs po-mode or <TT>poedit</TT>. It is integrated into KDE, and offers
 660 extensive contextual help. Besides support for various PO file features, it
 661 has a plugin framework for dictionaries, that allows consistency checks and
 662 translation suggestions.
 663
 664 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00084000000000000000">
 665 GNOME: the gtranslator editor</A>
 666 </H2>
 667   XXX: in preparation.
 668
 669 <H2><A NAME="SECTION00090000000000000000">
 670 Bibliography</A>
 671 </H2><DL COMPACT><DD><P></P><DT><A NAME="xkb-oriya-layout">1</A>
 672 <DD>
 673 G.&nbsp;Mohanty,
 674 <BR>A practical primer for using Oriya under Linux, v0.3,
 675 <BR><TT><A NAME="tex2html1"
 676   HREF="http://oriya.sarovar.org/docs/getting_started/index.html">http://oriya.sarovar.org/docs/getting_started/index.html</A></TT>, 2004,
 677 <BR>Sec.&nbsp;6.2 describes the xkb layouts for Oriya.
 678
 679 <P></P><DT><A NAME="url:oriya-trans-plan">2</A>
 680 <DD>
 681 G.&nbsp;Mohanty,
 682 <BR>A plan for Oriya localization, v0.1,
 683 <BR><TT><A NAME="tex2html2"
 684   HREF="http://oriya.sarovar.org/docs/translation_plan/index.html">http://oriya.sarovar.org/docs/translation_plan/index.html</A></TT>,
 685   2004.
 686
 687 <P></P><DT><A NAME="url:lj-translation">3</A>
 688 <DD>
 689 Linux Journal article on internationalization,
 690 <BR><TT><A NAME="tex2html3"
 691   HREF="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3023">http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3023</A></TT>.
 692
 693 <P></P><DT><A NAME="url:kbabel">4</A>
 694 <DD>
 695 Features of the kbabel editor,
 696 <BR><TT><A NAME="tex2html4"
 697   HREF="http://i18n.kde.org/tools/kbabel/features.html">http://i18n.kde.org/tools/kbabel/features.html</A></TT>.
 698 </DL>
 699
 700 <H1><A NAME="SECTION000100000000000000000">
 701 About this document ...</A>
 702 </H1>
 703  <STRONG>A tutorial on Native Language Support using GNU gettext</STRONG><P>
 704 This document was generated using the
 705 <A HREF="http://www.latex2html.org/"><STRONG>LaTeX</STRONG>2<tt>HTML</tt></A> translator Version 2002-2-1 (1.70)
 706 <P>
 707 Copyright &#169; 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996,
 708 <A HREF="http://cbl.leeds.ac.uk/nikos/personal.html">Nikos Drakos</A>,
 709 Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
 710 <BR>Copyright &#169; 1997, 1998, 1999,
 711 <A HREF="http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~ross/">Ross Moore</A>,
 712 Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
 713 <P>
 714 The command line arguments were: <BR>
 715  <STRONG>latex2html</STRONG> <TT>-no_math -html_version 4.0,math,unicode,i18n,tables -split 0 memo</TT>
 716 <P>
 717 The translation was initiated by Gora Mohanty on 2004-07-24
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