This pre-announcement is being sent for information to both R-help and BioC. Please use R-devel@r-project.org for any follow-up discussion. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - We are about at the end of a several-week process of adding support for non-Latin character sets and non-Western-European languages to R. - For Linux users, R works in the UTF-8 locales that are rapidly becoming the standard in the latest distributions: for example if in Fedora Core 3 I select English (United Kingdom) I get locale en_GB.utf8. This is also true of those commercial Unixes which support such locales. - For Linux/Unix users, R works in many non-English locales with other encodings such as EUC-JP. The only one that we are having problems with is vi_VN.tcvn (but the Vietnamese UTF-8 locale appears to work). - For Windows users, R works in the double-byte `East Asian' locales as well as many others, if support is selected at installation time. (See the current rw-FAQ for more discussion of this: this is supported in the current automated builds of r-devel on CRAN.) - There are built-in facilities to convert between encodings, so that e.g. Japanese in SHIFT-JIS can be read by R running under UTF-8 or EUC- JP. - There are mechanisms to translate both C and R error messages from both base R and for packages, and also the menus etc of the Windows and MacOS X GUIs. The purpose of this pre-announcement is to alert developers that these changes will be coming in 2.1.0 in a couple of months. - Package writers who would like to translate messages in their packages, or to prepare their packages for translation by others should consult http://developer.r-project.org/210update.txt and the latest version of `Writing R Extensions' in the R-devel sources. All the standard packages and a few of the recommended ones have been prepared and updates will be appearing on CRAN shortly. - People might like to start organizing translation teams for their own languages, and early experience from such a team would be helpful in polishing the instructions and mechanisms. There is a document for translators at http://developer.r-project.org/Translations.html If translations are available by early April they can be shipped with 2.1.0 (although there are planned to be mechanisms to add them to an R installation). - We will be looking for testers in the alpha/beta period in about a month's time, and would-be users of R in unusual languages (e.g. Vietnamese) would be especially helpful as testers. This is particularly important for Windows 95/98/ME to which we only have very limited access, to English versions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - -- Brian D. Ripley, ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595