Simple Multilingual Support for Tcl

The first, and often largest, step toward internationalization of an interactive application is translation of its output messages, prompts, etc. into the desired language. This is typically done with a ‘‘message catalog’’: the program supplies a key of some kind, which is looked up in the catalog to yield the appropriate translation. While this basic approach is impossible to avoid (given the infeasibility of automated translation), the engineering details matter a great deal. Programmers can cope with almost infinitely messy interfaces if they must (as witness X programming before Tk), but convincing them to use a new interface voluntarily requires ease of use. Ideally, doing it right should be easier than doing it wrong. If there are concrete benefits from doing it right, doing it right can be slightly harder than doing it wrong. However, messagecatalog facilities are almost always quite a bit harder to use than puts. Hence applications typically use message catalogs only when it is explicitly demanded by the requirements, and retrofitting an application to use a message catalog is painful. A carefully designed message-catalog facility can be almost as easy to use as puts, and retrofitting it into a program can be relatively easy. The lookup key should be the message in the original language. Simple provisions for nested subtranslations, untranslated substrings, disambiguating tags, and either explicit (call a procedure) or implicit (done as part of output) translation are essential. Doing all this for Tcl takes care but is practical.