The program xgettext combines all equal strings in the source code into one output string for translation. This is normally what one would want.

BUT sometimes the same English string needs more than one translation, depending on context (one phrase for two concepts - not the same in translation). There seems to be no way. Correct?

Of course I could add an extra blank to distinguish the two cases, but I still wonder if there is a designed solution for this.

thanks
Mike

Can you give a specific example? I could imagine using gettext to internationalize your conosole programme.

If you mean the case of "Edit" for instance (one for menu option, but also for window title etc) you can distinguish those by adding context. Check pgettext() or gettext() with |

I had one example recently. The word "save" for a toolbar icon I translated to German "speich", but the same word in a menu item I translated to "speichern". The abbreviation was used for the toolbar because the full length word in German made the whole toolbar too long (all icons are spaced as far apart as the longest icon text requires). For the menu there is no length consideration.

There are many cases where one word is used for two meanings, needing two different words in another language. An example is the German word "Himmel" which can mean "heaven" or "sky" in English.

Gettext() has a method for doing this, but it is overly complex and requires header files to be copied from gettext.h and modified. I got around the problem by using "toolbar::save" for the toolbar and "save" for the menu, and then making a wrapper for gettext() that discards any text preceeding "::".