gettext: Using This Package
17.2.2 Using This Package
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As a user, if your language has been installed for this package, you
only have to set the ‘LANG’ environment variable to the appropriate
‘LL_CC’ combination. If you happen to have the ‘LC_ALL’ or some other
‘LC_xxx’ environment variables set, you should unset them before setting
‘LANG’, otherwise the setting of ‘LANG’ will not have the desired
effect. Here ‘LL’ is an ISO 639 two-letter language code, and ‘CC’ is
an ISO 3166 two-letter country code. For example, let’s suppose that
you speak German and live in Germany. At the shell prompt, merely
execute ‘setenv LANG de_DE’ (in ‘csh’), ‘export LANG; LANG=de_DE’ (in
‘sh’) or ‘export LANG=de_DE’ (in ‘bash’). This can be done from your
‘.login’ or ‘.profile’ file, once and for all.
You might think that the country code specification is redundant.
But in fact, some languages have dialects in different countries. For
example, ‘de_AT’ is used for Austria, and ‘pt_BR’ for Brazil. The
country code serves to distinguish the dialects.
The locale naming convention of ‘LL_CC’, with ‘LL’ denoting the
language and ‘CC’ denoting the country, is the one use on systems based
on GNU libc. On other systems, some variations of this scheme are used,
such as ‘LL’ or ‘LL_CC.ENCODING’. You can get the list of locales
supported by your system for your language by running the command
‘locale -a | grep '^LL'’.
Not all programs have translations for all languages. By default, an
English message is shown in place of a nonexistent translation. If you
understand other languages, you can set up a priority list of languages.
This is done through a different environment variable, called
‘LANGUAGE’. GNU ‘gettext’ gives preference to ‘LANGUAGE’ over ‘LANG’
for the purpose of message handling, but you still need to have ‘LANG’
set to the primary language; this is required by other parts of the
system libraries. For example, some Swedish users who would rather read
translations in German than English for when Swedish is not available,
set ‘LANGUAGE’ to ‘sv:de’ while leaving ‘LANG’ to ‘sv_SE’.
Special advice for Norwegian users: The language code for Norwegian
bokmål changed from ‘no’ to ‘nb’ recently (in 2003). During the
transition period, while some message catalogs for this language are
installed under ‘nb’ and some older ones under ‘no’, it’s recommended
for Norwegian users to set ‘LANGUAGE’ to ‘nb:no’ so that both newer and
older translations are used.
In the ‘LANGUAGE’ environment variable, but not in the ‘LANG’
environment variable, ‘LL_CC’ combinations can be abbreviated as ‘LL’ to
denote the language’s main dialect. For example, ‘de’ is equivalent to
‘de_DE’ (German as spoken in Germany), and ‘pt’ to ‘pt_PT’ (Portuguese
as spoken in Portugal) in this context.
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gettext: Translating Teams