Question

For example, in this simplest hello world program:

#include <iostream>
int main()
{
    std::cout<<"Hello World!"<<std::endl;
    return 0;
}

I’d like to see French if user’s environment LANG is set to fr_FR, it might looks like:

$ ./a.out
Hello World!

$ LANG=fr_FR.utf8
$ ./a.out
Bonjour tout le monde!

Is there a guideline of how to archieve this in Linux?

Answer 1

The key is to use “resources” (one per-language, configured to be read at runtime) vs. hard-coding strings. GUI frameworks like Qt and GTK+ make this (relatively) easy.

Here’s a link to the Pango” library used by GTK+ (but not, emphatically, exclusive to GTK+):

• http://www.pango.org/

Here’s a tutorial on using Pango:

• http://x11.gp2x.de/personal/google/

And here’s a tutorial on “gettext()” (which, I believe, Pango uses):

• http://inti.sourceforge.net/tutorial/libinti/internationalization.html