Shell Scripting: Expert Recipes for Linux, Bash, and More

Recipe 21-1: Internationalization

Most shell scripts are written in American English, and the vast majority never get translated into any other language. Similarly, some scripts get written in the local language and are never translated into any other languages. Sometimes this is absolutely fine — an in-house script for a single-language workforce does not need to work in any other languages. At other times, however, you may run into a number of different problems unless the script is translated. The fact that a person can’t use a script if he or she does not understand what it is saying is obviously a concern. If the script can communicate in somebody’s first language, then his or her understanding of the information can be much clearer. Further, it can also be a legal or contractual requirement that certain languages be supported.

The discussion in this chapter assumes that the original script was written in English and translated into other languages from there, but there is no requirement for it to be that way at all. The original script can be written to display any language whatsoever; whatever the script emits becomes the msgid, which is then translated into msgstr.

The first script that I wrote which used internationalization, was a script to configure a particular USB-attached ADSL modem under GNU/Linux (http://speedtouchconf.sourceforge.net/). At first, this script simply displayed some of the localization settings required for the modem to work with the user’s ISP — ...