steve@apollo.cfht.hawaii.edu (Steven Smith) (05/31/90)
I have just started trying to get the Native Language Support working for our site. We have many french speaking users, so I though, what a good idea. After snooping around manuals for a while I tried "LANG=french date" and this worked great. Then, since most of the other Unix man pages claimed to know about the LANG environment variable, I started trying other commands. Basically, they all kept using english. After a little more looking around I found the /usr/lib/nls directory. It has a directory "C" that contains many cat files, for most of the normal unix commands. Right next to this directory is the "french" directory, but it is basically empty. So my questions are, am I missing some files? or is HP missing some of my $'s? or is this vaporware? thanks, steve -- Steven S. Smith Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corp. steve@cfht.hawaii.edu
rer@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Rob Robason) (05/31/90)
steve> We have many french speaking users, so I though, what a good steve> idea. steve> Then, since most of the other Unix man pages claimed to know steve> about the LANG environment variable, I started trying other steve> commands. Basically, they all kept using english. steve> After a little more looking around I found the /usr/lib/nls steve> directory. It has a directory "C" that contains many cat files, steve> for most of the normal unix commands. Right next to this steve> directory is the "french" directory, but it is basically empty. steve> So my questions are, am I missing some files? or is HP missing steve> some of my $'s? or is this vaporware? Under french (or c-french for Canadian French) you'll find only those files which have generic information in them like date formatting and collation (sort) order. You find commands like date and sort work correctly, as well as functions like strcmp(). The job of going through all of our commands and translating every possible user error or interaction message into 25 langauges is too big for our small (mostly english speaking) commands section to pull off, though. It's possible that some of our intercontinental divisions, which leverage NLS heavily may be providing some of these translations, but I don't know if that is happening. In the absence of an ls.cat file under french, the ls command will use the C language message or the built-in string if C is unavailable. You can easily (given patience and knowledge of French) create your own message catalogs for LANG=french by doing a dumpmsg on a C message catalog into a file, translating the text to the appropriate French wording, then running gencat to produce the catalog under french. Some of our lab engineers had fun a few years ago creating the language LANG=hackerspeak which produced all sorts of obtuse and insulting remarks in place of the polite C messages. This was a fun exercise, but too tedious to carry out fully for all commands or for 25 languages. Perhaps the advent of OSF will precipitate generation of all these language catalogs that we need. NLS is not vaporware: the commands really do have the ability to respond to LANG settings by reading the available message catalogs, but all the data is not there (yet) and I don't know when it will be. Rob Robason Caveat: this is definitely my own stuff, and reflects a very limited view of the world. It would be presumptious to think that this represented the views or position of HP.
arnet@hpcupt1.HP.COM (Arne Thormodsen) (06/05/90)
Steven,
I have forwarded your comments onto the group responsible for the
localization of HP-UX (which includes translation of message catalogs).
They REALLY DO EXIST, but are *very* busy right now on various things.
No action on HP's part is implied in my doing this, but I'm sure they'd
be interested.
In the meantime, the manual "Native Language Support: HP-UX
Concepts and Tutorials" will tell you how to create your own catalogs
(in painful detail). You will need to configure your system to support
8-bit characters as well (for French), this is also in the manual. If
you do not have a French terminal then you will need to consult your
terminal manual to see how to access the various European characters in
HP's ROMAN8 character set. I assure you that the whole system works, my
own workstation is configured for Japanese, and ALL the commands give me
their errors and prompts in Japanese (which I can't read!).
--arne
Arne Thormodsen
CSG Internationalization