I’m wondering whether anyone can help me with a translation exercise.  I have a package named “oce”, which does oceanographic processing, and I’d like to make it produce graphs with labels that work in different languages.  For example, in English I write “Depth” and in Spanish I’d like to write “Profundidad”.

In my “po” directory I have R-oce.pot and es.po.  As a first step, I’ve translated just the phrases “Depth (m)” and “Depth [m]”.  Then I build and installed my package.  Within R,

library(oce)
bindtextdomain("R-oce”)

yields

 [1] "/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.0/Resources/library/oce/po”

and then, in the OSX shell,

msgunfmt /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.0/Resources/library/oce/po/es/LC_MESSAGES/R-oce.mo | grep -1 Depth

yields
msgid "Depth (m)"
msgstr "Profundidad (m)"
--
--
msgid "Depth [m]"
msgstr "Profundidad [m]”

so it seems that I have successfully installed the translations.  Then, I run R from the shell with

LC_MESSAGES=es_ES.UTF-8 R --no-save < spanish.R

where spanish.R consists of

library(oce)
cat(gettext("Depth (m)"), "\n")
and I get

...
R es un software libre y viene sin GARANTIA ALGUNA.
...

(i.e. a Spanish introduction paragraph from R) which suggests that my env-variable is OK, followed by

> library(oce)
Loading required package: mapproj
Loading required package: maps
> cat(gettext("Depth (m)"), "\n")
Depth (m)

which, obviously, has not translated the text.  A similar test with

LANG=es_ES.UTF-8 R --no-save < spanish.R

yields the same results.

All of this is with R 3.0.2 on an Apple OSX platform (Mavericks); session info is below.

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)
locale:
[1] es_ES.UTF-8/es_ES.UTF-8/es_ES.UTF-8/C/es_ES.UTF-8/es_ES.UTF-8
attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
other attached packages:
[1] oce_0.9-14    mapproj_1.2-1 maps_2.3-2


QUESTION: any hints on how I can get the translations to be passed through gettext()?

Thanks!


Dan E. Kelley, Professor  and Graduate Coordinator
Oceanography Department, Dalhousie University
PO BOX 15000
Halifax, NS B3H 4R2
phone:(902)494-1694 fax:(…)-3877 Dan.Kelley@Dal.CA<mailto:Dan.Kelley@Dal.CA>
http://oceanography.dal.ca/person/Kelley_Dan.html
http://graduatecoordinator.oceanography.dal.ca/


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