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The User's View

When GNU gettext will truly have reached is goal, average users should feel some kind of astonished pleasure, seeing the effect of that strange kind of magic that just makes their own native language appear everywhere on their screens. As for naive users, they would ideally have no special pleasure about it, merely taking their own language for granted, and becoming rather unhappy otherwise.

So, let's try to describe here how we would like the magic to operate, as we want the users' view to be the simplest, among all ways one could look at GNU gettext. All other software engineers: programmers, translators, maintainers, should work together in such a way that the magic becomes possible. This is a long and progressive undertaking, and information is available about the progress of the GNU Translation Project.

When a package is distributed, there are two kind of users: installers who fetch the distribution, unpack it, configure it, compile it and install it for themselves or others to use; and end users that call programs of the package, once these have been installed at their site. GNU gettext is offering magic for both installers and end users.


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