Re: Internationalizing Linux

Roger Gammans (rgammans@computer-surgery.co.uk)
Tue, 8 Dec 1998 18:34:23 +0000


In article <Pine.LNX.3.96.981207165213.12761Q-100000@52-a-
usw.rb1.blv.nwnexus.net>, Tim Smith <tzs@tzs.net> writes
>One thing to note when internationalizing things is that the *order* of
>arguments sometimes needs to be changed. Something in one language that
>might be written as
>
> Could not do task <X> because of condition <Y>
>
>might, under different grammatical rules of another language, have to be
>written as
>
> A condition <Y> prevented doing task <X>
>
>A truly horrible kludge I've used in that case is to put this in my code:
[kludge snipped]

A neat way I've seen it done, is to leave the format specifiers in the
printks, eg. printk() becomes printk("<TAG>:%d:%s");

And then tag lookup contains postional specifiers so
somewhere in our Language [file|array] we have:-
TAG: A condition %1 prevented doing task %2
or
TAG: Could not do task %2 because of condition %1

The remaining issue with this is choice of seperator character (colon
above).

TTFN

-- 
Roger Gammans

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