[jboss-dev] jboss i18n and localization (l10n)

[Jens Petersen]

Steve Ebersole wrote:
> On Friday 27 July 2007 03:57:14 am Max Rydahl Andersen wrote:
>>> For (1), the translation process, in the Open Source world a lot of
>> what opensource world is that ? :)
> LOL

The non-Java one? :-)

>> The built in java method of localization (java ResourceBundles defaults
>> to use properties, one project I know of using that is Hibernate Search)

Yup, and gettext should be able to handle the string extraction and 
conversion of translations to Java ResourceBundles.

>> The other is the way used in e.g. eclipse which uses the (some say
>> technically better) i18n library developed by IBM which I unfortunately
>> can't remember the name of now.

ICU (International Components for Unicode)?

> These are things the doc team keep mentioning to me.  They are meant for full 
> blown translations as in docs.  They seem total overkill for this, especially 
 > the PO stuff.

Not really: .po files are used heavily for software translation, eg 
localization of GNOME and most GNU projects is entirely based on gettext
.po files.

> Java internationalization (no idea about this IBM stuff) is 
> based on already externalized strings kept in a file separate from the code 
> for easy translation.

I think the problem with that is that the source, the strings to be 
translated, and the translationed strings are then all in different 
places which makes it quite a bit harder to maintain and keep things in 
sync.

Jens
-- 
Jens Petersen
Internationalization Team
Red Hat