Internationalization (The GNU Awk User’s Guide)

13 Internationalization with gawk

Once upon a time, computer makers wrote software that worked only in English. Eventually, hardware and software vendors noticed that if their systems worked in the native languages of non-English-speaking countries, they were able to sell more systems. As a result, internationalization and localization of programs and software systems became a common practice.

For many years, the ability to provide internationalization was largely restricted to programs written in C and C++. This chapter describes the underlying library gawk uses for internationalization, as well as how gawk makes internationalization features available at the awk program level. Having internationalization available at the awk level gives software developers additional flexibility—they are no longer forced to write in C or C++ when internationalization is a requirement.

• I18N and L10N		Internationalization and Localization.
• Explaining gettext		How GNU `gettext` works.
• Programmer i18n		Features for the programmer.
• Translator i18n		Features for the translator.
• I18N Example		A simple i18n example.
• Gawk I18N		`gawk` is also internationalized.
• I18N Summary		Summary of I18N stuff.