Introduction

Currently, both commercial and free computer software is typically written and documented in English. Till recently, little effort was expended towards allowing them to interact with the user in languages other than English, thus leaving the non-English speaking world at a disadvantage. However, that changed with the release of the GNU gettext utilities, and nowadays most GNU programs are written within a framework that allows easy translation of the program message to languages other than English. Provided that translations are available, the language used by the program to interact with the user can be set at the time of running it. gettext manages to achieve this seemingly miraculous task in a manner that simplifies the work of both the programmer and the translator, and, more importantly, allows them to work independently of each other.

This article describes how to support native languages under a system using the GNU gettext utilities. While it should be applicable to other versions of gettext, the one actually used for the examples here is version 0.12.1. Another system, called catgets, described in the X/Open Portability Guide, is also in use, but we shall not discuss that here.