Re: Internationalization question

[Simon Waters]

Carl Simard wrote:
> 
> I'm a java developper at CRIM (Centre de Recherche Informatique de Montréal)
> and I have to make a french version of your GNU CHESS game (I try it and
> it's a good game) for the Colibris project (www.mille.ca). The objective of
> this project is to offert many french open source softwares to education
> community.

Hi Carl,

I assume you are familiar with the work of OFSET http://www.ofset.org/

Bruno Coudin has done some work producing educational interfaces for GNU
Chess which work in multiple languages.

If you are internationalizing free software for education I'm sure they
would be very eager to share experiences.

> I have already download your source code, look at it and try to figure out
> how it work. I guess I have to update your GNUCHESS.LAN file with a french
> version of mine. This will be easy and I will send you the french version
> when I finish him. The targeted system is Windows (first) and Linux
> (second). I'm in Windows 2000 and Linux Mandrake environment.

The current version of the chess engine has no internationalization work
done on the code base, and no gnuchess.lan file. Are you perhaps looking
at an old version (version 4) ? 5.07 is current.

Whilst it wouldn't be onerous to do such work, I'm not sure how useful
it would be as very few people use the raw command line interface. It
strikes me that such efforts might be better aimed at the user
interfaces that utilise Winboard protocol chess engines (Winboard +
Xboard (not sure what their internationalization is like), SCID (already
available in 13 languages), Knights (need some help with translations I
believe - project provides a KDE based interface).

Since the Winboard engine protocol is in (American) english, any
internationalisation must only apply to the output when used at the
command line (no --xboard), or in informational messages sent to Xboard
(there are very few of these currently, mostly related to the opening book).

Language choice should be inherited through the usual mechanisms for the
platform in use, I've no idea how Windows does this, but *nix systems do
it via the POSIX locale. Although of course a command line option to
overrule this seems sensible.

GNU Coding standards suggest the use of 'gettext' for internationalization.
http://www.gnu.org/directory/gettext.html
Although I'm not experienced in this area.

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