Mpich has support for providing error messages in different languages. This makes use of the X/Open message catalog services, which are a standard way of providing multi-language support. This multi-language support is often called NLS, for National Language Support. Mpich comes with error messages in US English; additional languages will be provided as we get the translations (if you wish to provide one, please send mail to [email protected]). More precisely, mpich uses an English version that uses the ISO Latin-1 character set (ISO8859-1). We expect to provide other versions that also use the Latin-1 character set, subject to getting translations of the messages.
To create a new message catalog, copy the file mpich.En_US.msg to mpich.mylanguage.msg and translate the entries. The value of mylanguage should match the ones used for your system; for example, mpich.De_DE.msg for German. Many systems put their NLS files in /usr/lib/nls/msg; you can also check the value of the environment variable NLSPATH on your system. Note that some systems provide the routines and programs to support NLS, but do not make use of it and do not provide a initial NLSPATH value.
For emacs users, check the Emacs info under ``European Display''.
The commands
M-x standard-display-european M-x iso-accents-modecan be used to input most European languages. You can also load iso-transl and use C-x 8 to compose characters (this sets the high bit in the character). Mpich currently does not support languages that require multi-byte character sets (such as Japanese). However, the only changes needed are in the file src/env/errmsg.c; if you are interested in developing a multi-byte character set version, please let us know.
By default, mpich uses the value of NLSPATH to find the message catalogs. If this fails, it tries MPICHNLSPATH, and if that fails, it uses English language versions that are coded into the library.
The catalogs are not, however, installed into these directories. Instead, you will find them in the library directory for a particular architecture; for example, mpich/rs6000/lib.