[OTR-dev] [Patch] Internationalisation for gaim-otr

[Thomas B.]

Hi Scott!

Scott Ellis wrote:
> There are other bits of text in the library, which could use some
> internationalization. Do you have any plans to go that far? If so, am
> I going to need to build more gnu libraries under windows? It's
> already quite a nightmare to build if you don't cross compile from a
> linux machine.

Yes, I wanted to wait for feedback on my gaim-otr patch first, but then
I'd like to put internationalisation support into libotr, too. The most
obvious idea would be to implement that using gettext, which would
introduce a new dependency on gettext, if you want to use it. But I
would try to implement that as an optional feature, so that you can turn
it off with a configure option or with a #define or something like that.
And even if you want to use it, maybe you don't have to build gettext
yourself, I just noticed that you can download precompiled gettext
packages from the GNOME ftp server:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/win32/dependencies/

> Also, Miranda already contains its own simple but quite effective
> translation machanism. Would it be possible to use callback functions
> or similar to allow applications using the library to do their own
> translation?

I have also thought about something like that, and that should be
possible. However, I think a disadvantage of letting applications
translate the messages themselves could be that then each of those
applications would have to maintain the set of translations for the
libotr messages themselves. But if that's less a nightmare for you than
linking gettext into your plugin, then I could try to implement that ;-)

Thomas