[sane-devel] Encoding of backend translations

[mh]

Sergey Vlasov, Freitag, 1. März 2002 15:26:
> On Fri, 1 Mar 2002 14:12:21 +0100
> > I'd just like to ask, whether it would be a problem to use
> > UFT8 encoding for the backend translations?
> > Reason:
> > The KDE i18n framework has been switched to UTF8; .mo files
> > generated from .po files encoded e.g. in iso-8859-1 are not
> > displayed correctly (missing "Umlaute"/vowel mutations).
> > As far as I know, this wouldn't affect xsane (Oliver?), but
> > would make access to the backend translations much easier for
> > KDE applications.
>
> The recent GNU gettext (starting with 0.10.36, released in March
> 2001) has the ability to reencode translations on the fly.  By
> default it reencodes to the current locale encoding, but you can
> use bind_textdomain_codeset() to select any other encoding
> (including UTF-8).
>
> The question is: how many people still have old gettext?  If we
> will use UTF8 in backend translations, people using old gettext
> will have problems with non-KDE apps.  If we rely on the GNU
> gettext reencoding capabilities, this will be the problem for
> people which use old gettext and KDE apps.
>
> Also, many programs still cannot work with UTF-8 - this may be a
> problem for translators.
(I guess, this should have gone to the list ?)

I'm no i18n expert and my suggestion was only based on my own tests. I 
recoded the translations included in SANE-1.0.7 to utf8, and couldn't see any 
problems with xsane, although it seems to use gettext 0.10.35.
Nevertheless, what's the solution? Is it possible, to add a configure option 
like "--enable-utf8-encoding" and then use a script, which runs "recode" on 
the .po files? Or should I just ask people to recode it themselves (not so 
nice)?

Michael