Re: An i18n problem.

[Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic srce hr>]

Bart Schuller <schuller@lunatech.com> writes:

> Now what happens when we want to translate our favourite example
> word "Free"? Here the authoritative language doesn't differentiate
> between the meanings "libre" and "gratis".

I may be missing something, but I18N is usually not based on words,
but on translatable phrases.  So, you would write:

printf (_("Say that you love %s\n"), emacs_name);

Then the string `Say that you love %s\n' would be snarfed into the
message catalog, and would be translated to various languages with
little or no ambiguity.

(in the above example, `_' is a macro for `gettext'.)

> Maybe we should treat English as a foreign language too, and use the
> longer, disambiguated phrases as the keys in the message catalog.

Isn't that how it is already done?

-- 
Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> | Student at FER Zagreb, Croatia
--------------------------------+--------------------------------
* Q: What is an experienced Emacs user?
* A: A person who wishes that the terminal had pedals.