Translation of R script using gettext
You can use base::gettext/ngettext, base::bindtextdomain and tools::xgettext2pot functions.
For example:
myFunction <- function(){ bindtextdomain("R-myProgram","/my/translation/dir") gettext("Hello",domain="R-myProgram")}
Then, supposing this function is inside a file whose path is "/my/dir/R/myfile.R" use: tools::xgettext2pot("/my/dir", "/my/translation/dir/pot/R-myProgram.pot")
then use msginit, msgfmt, etc. to create a .mo file /my/translation/dir/fr/LC_MESSAGES/R-myProgram.mo
. myFunction() should now print "Bonjour" instead of "Hello" if your locale is French.
A couple of other points :
- It seems like xgettext2pot assumes your project is a standard R package and looks only for *.R files inside the R/ subdirectory.
- The
domain
argument seems to be by default the namespace of the function calling gettext() - stop(), message(), warning() and packupStartupMessage() are also detected by xgettext2pot. There is also a gettextf() function available as a sprintf-like variant of gettext().
- Since the standard xgettext utility doesn't seem to support R syntax, and since one has to use tools::xgettext2pot, a couple of things will miss from the standard approach, such as message contexts (pgettext()), flags indicating printf-like strings and the possibility to write in-code comments for the translators (extracted by xgettext -c) without modifying the .pot file by hand.