[sane-devel] SANE2 standard revisited: i18n

[Sergey Vlasov]

On Thu, 5 Dec 2002 22:57:22 +0100
Henning Meier-Geinitz <henning at meier-geinitz.de> wrote:

> So first, a technical question: can we assume that the GNU gettext
> generated .gmo files are the same on every platform? So transferring
> over the net from a completely different computer works? Otherwise we
> can't use them for the function approach.

The .gmo files are written in the byte order of the machine where they
are generated (so there are two possible versions of the format).
However, the GNU gettext library can load .gmo files both in the
native and byte-swapped format (of course the native format will be
faster).

As alwayse, there is a possibility for a format change (the .gmo
format includes a version number field).

However, there is another potential problem with this approach
(translation in the frontend).  What if the backend returns some
string which contains variable information, e.g. by using sprintf()
internally?  In this case it is the format string which must be
translated, not the result of formatting - but such format string
translation can be performed only in the backend.

Such situation can arise with extended error messages (a backend may
wish to include some useful diagnostic information in the returned
string).