Re: Problem with gtranslator and utf-8 (slovak and azeri translations)

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 10:49:15PM +0800, R.I.P. Deaddog wrote:

> > There are two solutions (and only two solutions) to that problem:
> > 
> > - use utf-8 in the sources, encode the middle point in utf-8 and force the
> >   use of utf-8 for all the po files of gtranslator
> 
> Even the first solution won't work for 100%. When converting back from
> utf-8 to local charset, there's no corresponding char for the middle dot
> in all multibyte locale,

That's not a problem; just have the translation (the msgid) use a char
that does exist in all possible locales for the target language and that's it.

Even in case of a character that doesn't exist, gettext() internally uses
iconv with //TRANSLIT, so the program won't bomb or something like that;
probably the middle dot will be translitered as '.' (a singlke normal dot);
or in worst case, as a space.

That is not a real problem.

Not in comparaison of the annoyance of not being allowed to create any 
translation at all for Chinese (as all possible charset encodings for
Chinese will interpret a single \xb3 as illegal)

> > - use ascii only in the sources, change the \xb7 to some ascii only value
> >   (like "." or "#" or "_" or whatever)
> 
> Yes, this idea suggested by Gediminas can be a good solution; use ascii
> by default, and put some comment to tell iso8859-* translators to use
> \xb7 instead, while other encodings should use their own char.

Not \xb7. But "U00B7" (not even all iso8859-* have U00B7 at 0xb7 place).

It must also be told in the comment that it can be translated to anything;
the default choice may depend from language. For example in Catalan the
middle dot is char actually used for the language, so it's use as a special
marker may be troublesome and another choice could be done for the mark
of blank space.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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