Do multilanguage application

[Johannes Pfau]

Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>On 2011-08-12 23:02, bioinfornatics wrote:
>> Dear,
>> I would like to know how do a multilanguage application. It seem it
>> is possible by using flag -J but they are no document for this
>> feature. link givent in this page
>> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/dmd-linux.html seem to be wrong
>>
>> if you can do a little example, will be nice
>>
>> thanks
>>
>> kind regards
>
>It's fairly simple. You just need a file containing keys and values. 
>This file can be read either at compile time or runtime. Read the file 
>into an associative array and when you need a piece of text translated 
>just pass the key to a function which retries the corresponding value 
>from the associative array.

I think the std.string functions tr, translate, maketrans are meant to
do that.
But there's a lot more to proper i18n and even for translation a simple
key/value table isn't perfect.
gettext for example also handles plural forms and context information.
(A translation might be different depending on it's context.)

Implementing all this stuff can get quite difficult, just have a look
at the plural formulas for different languages:
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/l10n/pluralforms

>
>You could take a look at how internalization is don in Ruby on Rails, 
>this can be applied to D as well:
>http://guides.rubyonrails.org/i18n.html
>


-- 
Johannes Pfau