Hello, First of all, I want to say thank you to the Guile, Haunt, ffi-helper and related projects’ developers. I built my personal website [1] using David Thompson’s Haunt [2] and recently talked my university’s Islamic Students’ Association (Islamische Hochschulvereinigung) into using Haunt for their not-yet-finished website as well, because I think the concept of Haunt and SHTML is superior to alternatives. However in order to make the website multilingual (the user can choose to view it in German or English) so far I used an association list with assoc-ref which is not very comfortable since all strings have to be added in two places, i.e. in the SHTML code and in the association list where the code looks for translations. I want to ask for your thoughts on my new solution since translations are probably important to many Haunt users. In particular, I believe there was some discussion on Website translation on the Guile or Guix lists as well. I did not want to use the ordinary gettext functions in order to not call setlocale very often to switch languages. It seems the Gettext system is not designed for rapidly changing locales, but maybe I am wrong about this and very many setlocale calls would not be that bad. Using Matt Wette’s ffi-helper [3] and the libgettextpo from GNU Gettext, [4] I now wrote code to convert a po file into an association list where I can now look up translations. (Note that I had to make some patches to the c99dev branch of nyacc before building nyacc and ffi-helper because the Makefile had spaces instead of tabs at one place and it did not find guile and guild. Maybe these patches were just necessary because of a broken setup on my part though.) I used this dot.ffi file to create libgettextpo bindings: (define-ffi-module (gettext-po) #:include '("gettext-po.h") #:library '("libgettextpo")) Then I wrote a procedure to convert a po file to an association list to look up the msgstr for a msgid. Note that by lingua I basically mean a locale. (use-modules (gettext-po) (system ffi-help-rt) ((system foreign) #:prefix ffi:) […]) (define xerror-handler-struct (make-struct-po_xerror_handler)) ; TODO SET HANDLERS: ;; […] (define (translations-for-lingua lingua) "Returns po/.po converted to an association list of msgid–msgstr pairs." ;; TODO: STILL DISREGARDING PLURALS AND OTHER INFORMATION (let* ((po-file (po_file_read_v3 (string-append "po/" lingua ".po") (pointer-to xerror-handler-struct))) (translations (if (ffi:null-pointer? (unwrap~pointer po-file)) '() ;; otherwise: (let ((iter (po_message_iterator po-file ffi:%null-pointer))) (let loop ((message (po_next_message iter))) (if (ffi:null-pointer? (unwrap~pointer message)) (begin (po_message_iterator_free iter) '()) ;; otherwise: (cons (cons (ffi:pointer->string (po_message_msgid message)) (ffi:pointer->string (po_message_msgstr message))) (loop (po_next_message iter))))))))) (if (not (ffi:null-pointer? (unwrap~pointer po-file))) (po_file_free po-file)) translations)) I did this for every locale and made a second association list mapping the locales to the msgid–msgstr association lists. Then I wrote translated-msg to do the lookup. (define (translations-entry-for-lingua lingua) "Returns a pair of LINGUA and an association list of its translations." (cons lingua (translations-for-lingua lingua))) (define translated-msg ;; gettext is not used directly because it would require repeated ;; setlocale calls, which should not be necessary. ;; See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3398113/php-gettext-problems (let ((translation-lists (map translations-entry-for-lingua linguas))) (define (with-default value default) (if value value default)) (lambda (msgid lingua) "Returns the msgstr for MSGID from the po file for LINGUA." (let ((translations (assoc-ref translation-lists lingua))) (with-default (assoc-ref translations msgid) msgid))))) As a Gettext-like shorthand I wrote a macro called _ which calls the above translated-msg function. It takes the locale from the current-lingua variable, so the macro deliberately breaks hygiene. (define-syntax _ (lambda (x) "Gettext-like shorthand for translated-msg with what currently is current-lingua." (syntax-case x () ((_ msg) (with-syntax ((current-lingua (datum->syntax x 'current-lingua))) #'(translated-msg msg current-lingua)))))) I use it like in this excerpt: (define (back-button-for-lingua lingua) "SXML for a link back to the home page." (let ((current-lingua lingua)) `(a (@ (href ,(string-append "/index" "-" lingua ".html")) (class "full-width-link")) ,(_ "← Back to home page")))) Then I ran the xgettext program from the terminal to create a pot file from all strings marked with _. xgettext -f po/POTFILES -o po/pelzfloriande-website.pot --from-code=UTF-8 --copyright-holder="" --package-name="pelzfloriande-website" --msgid-bugs-address="pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de" --keyword=_ Xgettext autodetected all the strings that were marked for translation. This is much better than my previous approach where I had to list all of them manually in a manually written association list. To create a po file from a pot file, I do the usual: cd po msginit -l de --no-translator msginit -l en --no-translator Then I filled out the po files using gtranslator. I can now run “haunt build” with an appropriate GUILE_LOAD_PATH, for me currently: GUILE_LOAD_PATH=$HOME/keep/projects/pelzfloriande-website:$HOME/build/nyacc/src/nyacc/examples:$GUILE_LOAD_PATH GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH=$GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH:$HOME/.cache/guile/ccache/2.2-LE-8-3.A/home/florian/keep/projects/pelzfloriande-website haunt build Is this the right approach? You can find my unfinished, not very clean code at [5]. Regards, Florian [1] https://pelzflorian.de [2] https://haunt.dthompson.us/ [3] https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/nyacc/ [4] https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/libgettextpo.html [5] https://pelzflorian.de/git/pelzfloriande-website/commit/?id=5f97bf157eaddcfe722c97dcab349b7dcfbbcd9d