Marking translatable strings

[Aahz Maruch]

In article <oq4sgvf0m1.fsf at titan.progiciels-bpi.ca>,
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Fran=E7ois_Pinard?=  <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>
>So, I want the big picture right now.  That is: a technique for marking
>strings for automatic extraction and building of PO files, and a technique
>for using PO files from within Python scripts.  I foresee that Python
>introduces an usual difficulty in that the textual domain for translations
>may vary quite unexpectedly, when the control dynamically flies between
>independent packages under different textual domains.

Y'know, it might help those of us with an interest in I18N but little
actual experience if you posted some resources that gave information
about what the heck a "PO file" is and how one is suposed to generate
and access it in other languages.  (Yes, I could search the web, but
it'd be difficult for me to determine which sites are the most useful.)

Personally, if you want to accomplish anything useful in the 1.6
timeframe, I think you'll be best off creating some sort of I18N module
or package and constructing an automatic approach that relies on strings
being used through this package if they are intended to be
internationalized.

This does ignore the big problem of doc strings, but IMO doc strings
should be used more by programmers than end-users -- I *don't* like them
for printing output.  In any event, I don't think you can solve this
problem in the pre-2.0 timeframe, though it's certainly worth laying the
groundwork now.
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