Go bindings for GNU gettext, an internationalization and localization library for writing multilingual systems.

• GNU gettext

Installation should be straightforward on Linux.

Installing gettext on a Mac is a bit awkward:

brew install gettext

export CGO_LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/opt/gettext/lib
export CGO_CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/opt/gettext/include

go get github.com/gosexy/gettext

Use go get to download and install the binding:

go get github.com/gosexy/gettext

This is an example program showing the BindTextdomain, Textdomain and SetLocale bindings:

package main

import (
	"fmt"

	"github.com/gosexy/gettext"
)

func main() {
	textDomain := "default"

	gettext.BindTextdomain(textDomain, "path/to/domains")
	gettext.Textdomain(textDomain)

	gettext.SetLocale(gettext.LcAll, "es_MX.utf8")

	fmt.Println(gettext.Gettext("Hello, world!"))
}

Set the LANGUAGE env to the name of the language you want to use in your program:

export LANGUAGE="es_MX.utf8"
./myapp

You can use the xgettext command to extract strings to be translated from a Go program:

go get github.com/gosexy/gettext/go-xgettext

go-xgettext -o outfile.pot --keyword=Gettext --keyword-plural=NGettext infile.go

This will generate a example.pot file.

After actually translating the .pot file, you'll have to generate .po and .mo files with msginit and msgfmt:

msginit -l es_MX -o example.po -i example.pot
msgfmt -c -v -o example.mo example.po

Finally, move the .mo file to an appropriate location.

mv example.mo examples/es_MX.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/example.mo

Check out the API documentation godoc.org/github.com/gosexy/gettext).

The original gettext documentation:

man 3 gettext

And here's a good tutorial on using gettext.