[TransWarp] internationalization

[Radek Kanovsky]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2003 at 08:49:01AM -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

Sorry for delay.

> >I have searched through the web for some smart solution but haven't found
> >anything.
> 
> Have you looked at Zope 3's 'zope.i18n' package?

Never seen before but studying now. It seems that they extracted some
data from IBM's ICU library and re-implemented some parts of it. They
use gettext for message catalogs and with "interpolation" solved
problem with positional parameters. zope.i18n imports from other zope.*
packages so it would be difficult to use it independently (I don't
know zope much). I like very the idea of explicit translation with
ITranslationService that is important for component architecture. While
gettext itself translates messages immediately/implicitly during _(...)
calls and there is almost no possibility to adapt this process.

My previous mail was probably fuzzy. I wanted to say that gettext
or gettext backed solution is not sufficient for me. Sometimes many
percent of source code occupies 'if-else' constructs that deal with
plural-singular, gender and other possibilities. Source could be more
cleaner if we would have support from some smart active message catalog.

I have started to write a prototype. Message catalog format is now
simulated by raw python module. Catalog should be able to solve
things like this (in pseudocode) :

    encoding: iso-8859-2
    language: cz

    hello: "Ahoj!"

    hello(name): "Ahoj %s!" % name

    records_found(num) :
        if num == 1 : "Nalezen 1 zaznam"
        elif num in [2,3,4] : "Nalezeny %n zaznamy" % num
        else : "Nalezeno %n zaznamu" % num

Now usage is simpler:
   
    _ = some_active_catalog_factory(domain, default_catalog_near_this_module)

    greeting1 = _.hello
    greeting2 = _.hello('Alice')
    found = _.records_found(len(result))

"_" has redefined __getattr__ method so it is able to catch message
ids and emit MessageId instances. I can create more rich context in
__getattr__ (module name, function name, line number, etc) and this
context can be available to active catalog during translation.

> Also, I believe GNU gettext has support for declaring different
> translations of the same string based on a numeric value formula.

I am not aware of such support. But there are many other problems with
localization: There is often very hard to find one general translation
of simple english sentence that fits in all occurrences. This translation
may vary according to context.

RadekK