gettext is the GNU internationalization (i18n) library. It is commonly used for writing multilingual programs. The latest version is 0.14.5.

Workflow

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Programmer

Source code is first modified to use the GNU gettext calls. This is, for most programming languages, done by wrapping strings that the user will see in the gettext function. To save on typing time, this function is usually aliased to _, so that the C code printf("My name is %s.\n", my_name); would become printf(_("My name is %s.\n"), my_name);

In addition to C, GNU gettext has the following implementations: C++, Objective-C, sh script, bash script, Python, GNU CLISP, Emacs Lisp, librep, GNU Smalltalk, Java, GNU awk, Pascal, wxWidgets (through the wxLocale class), YCP (the YaST2 language), Tcl, Perl, PHP, Pike, and R. Usage is similar to C for most of these.

xgettext is run on the sources to produce a .pot file, or template, which contains a list of all the translatable strings extracted from the sources. For the above, an entry in the .pot file would look like:

#: src/name.c:36 msgid "My name is %s.\n" msgstr ""

Translator

The translator derives a .po file from the template using the msginit program, then fills out the translations. msginit initializes the translations so, for instance, if we wish to create a French language translation, we'd run msginit --locale=fr --input=name.pot

This will create fr.po. A sample entry would look like

#: src/name.c:36 msgid "My name is %s.\n" msgstr "My name is %s.\n"

The translator will have to edit these, either by hand or with a translation tool like poEdit. When they are done, the entry will look like this:

#: src/name.c:36 msgid "My name is %s.\n" msgstr "Je m'appelle %s.\n"

Finally, the .po files are compiled into binary .mo files with msgfmt. These are now ready for distribution with the software package.

User

The user, on Unix-type systems, sets the environment variable LANG, and the program will display strings in the selected language, if there is a .mo file for it.

External links

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• Gettext homepage
• Gettext Commons - Java gettext utilities
• The "Autotools Tutorial" by Alexandre Duret-Lutz introduces Autoconf, Automake, Libtool, and Gettext.

GNU project software

GNU gettext | Gettext | Gettext | Gettext | GNU gettext