Not able to translate my C GTK program

[stemmo (Stefano M)]

Hi everyone,
I’m not able to translate my program by the gettext utility.

I surrounded the strings with ‘_(msg)’ characters.
I get the .pot file and I’ve translated the strings.
Then I put the output files in this folders:

# ls -lR locales/
locales/:
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct  2 14:40 en
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct  2 14:44 es
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2290 Oct  2 15:25 lux.pot

locales/en:
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct  2 14:41 LC_MESSAGES
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2309 Oct  2 15:29 lux.po

locales/en/LC_MESSAGES:
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 517 Oct  2 15:29 lux.mo

locales/es:
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct  2 14:45 LC_MESSAGES
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1906 Sep 29 14:01 lux.po

locales/es/LC_MESSAGES:
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 372 Oct  2 14:45 lux.mo

I added the following code:

setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
const char *textdomainstr = "lux";
const char *textdomaindir = getenv("TEXTDOMAINDIR");
if (textdomaindir) 
{
	printf("> text in '%s'\n", textdomaindir);
	bindtextdomain(textdomainstr, textdomaindir);
}
printf("> textdomain '%s'\n", textdomainstr);
textdomain(textdomainstr);

printf("> LANG: '%s'\n", getenv("LANG"));

and I run the program with the following cl command:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/oracle/instantclient_19_19/ TEXTDOMAINDIR=./locales  LANG=en ./lux

The application is not translated with en language. In my output debug I see:

> text in './locales'
> textdomain 'lux'
> LANG: 'en'

and after some other output:

(process:30261): Gtk-WARNING **: 15:32:27.794: Locale not supported by C library.
    Using the fallback 'C' locale.

I don’t understand which should be the structure/distribution of the messages into the folder - found other forms …

Should be the call to gtk_init() done after or before that lines?

Any idea?
Thanks!

[gwillems]

Use locale -a to see the list of supported locales on your system.

I expect something like LANG=en_US.UTF-8 instead of just en.

[stemmo (Stefano M)]

Thanks,
the output is:

# locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
POSIX

[gwillems]

Which distribution are you using?

[stemmo (Stefano M)]

This is a Linaro OS, a Debian 10 derived for embedded board (Tinkerboard).

[gwillems]

hmm ok, sadly I don’t know about those embedded distros…

Maybe check the documentation of Linaro about how to support more locales, then use a LANG value from the supported list.

[stemmo (Stefano M)]

Ok,
I added a new locale en_US.utf8 by

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Now the local -a returns:

$ locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
POSIX
en_US.utf8

but again I have the default strings.

[stemmo (Stefano M)]

Maybe a silly question

Do I need to refresh the strings into the widgets ??

[gwillems]

I’m out of ideas…

What if you display an already translated widget like “GtkCalendar” and use “LANG=es_ES.utf8” ?
If you see the month/weeks in Spanish then the locale is correctly detected and setup by Gtk. In that case, your issue is probably that you app can’t find its translations.