Use of #define statements with translatable strings
Christian Stimming
christian at cstimming.de
Sun Mar 31 17:41:02 EDT 2013
Am Sonntag, 31. März 2013, 14:22:24 schrieb Alex Aycinena:
>
> #define CUT_TRANSACTION_LABEL N_("Cu_t Transaction")
> #define COPY_TRANSACTION_LABEL N_("_Copy Transaction")
> ...
> #define CUT_SPLIT_LABEL N_("Cu_t Split")
> #define COPY_SPLIT_LABEL N_("_Copy Split")
> ...
>
>
> Can anyone help me out here? I'm not sure how to proceed.
For the translation to work, two steps need to work correctly:
1. The strings must be marked in the source for extraction by the external
tool "xgettext", which copies them from the *.c files to the *.po files (with
gnucash.pot as intermediate template). This is a compile-time step.
2. At runtime, the English strings must be passed through the function
gettext( ).
To get a string to be extracted (step #1), you must mark the strings by any of
the macros mentioned in the gettext documentation - either N_( ), or _( ), or
S_( ) or whatever other macro exists. However, the macro must go around the
real string, not around any macro names. In your case, this is done correctly.
To get a string to be passed through gettext( ) at runtime, the strings can
either be enclosed by _( ), which expands at compile time to a call to
gettext( ). Alternatively, the const char* pointers from the strings can be
passed through gettext( ) or _( ) manually at some later point.
In your case, I don't know where you're using those macros. If they are used
in a place where the strings are expected in already translated form, N_( )
was wrong and you need to use _( ) instead. Alternatively, you can also use
_(CUT_SPLIT_LABEL) in the places where you need the translated string, and
CUT_SPLIT_LABEL where you need the not-yet-translated static string. Depends
on the context.
Regards,
Christian
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