i18n overview

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+\section{Internationalization}\label{internationalization}
+
+Although internationalization (i18n for short) of an application involves far
+more than just translating its text messages to another message (date, time and
+currency formats need changing too, some languages are written left to right
+and others right to left, character encoding may differ and many other things
+may need changing too), it is a necessary first step. wxWindows provides
+facilities for the messages translation with its 
+\helpref{wxLocale}{wxlocale} class and is itself fully translated into several
+languages (please consult wxWindows home page for the most up-to-date
+translations - and if you may translate it in one of the languages not done
+yet, your translations would be gratefully accepted for inclusion into the
+future versions of the library!).
+
+The wxWindows approach to i18n closely follows GNU gettext package. wxWindows uses the
+message catalogs which are binary compatible with gettext catalogs and this
+allows to use all of the programs in this package to work with them. But note
+that no additional libraries are needed during the run-time, however, so you
+have only the message catalogs to distribute and nothing else.
+
+However, during the program development you will need the gettext package for
+working with message catalogs. {\bf Warning:} gettext versions < 0.10 are known
+to be buggy, so you should find a later version of it!
+
+There are two kinds of message catalogs: source catalogs which are text files
+with extension .po and binary catalogs which are created from the source ones
+with {\it msgfmt} program (part fo gettext package) and have the extension .mo.
+Only the binary files are needed during program execution.
+
+The program i18n involves several steps:
+
+\begin{enumerate}\itemsep=0pt
+
+\item Translating the strings in the program text using 
+\helpref{wxGetTranslation}{wxgettranslation} or equivalently the \_() macro.
+
+\item Extracting the strings to be translated from the program: this uses the
+work done in the previous step because {\it xgettext} program used for string
+extraction may be told (using its -k option) to reckognize \_() and
+wxGetTranslation and extract all strings inside the calls to these functions.
+Alternatively, you may use -a option to extract all the strings, but it will
+usually result in many strings being found which don't have to be translated at
+all. This will create a text message catalog - a .po file.
+
+\item Translating the strings extracted in the previous step to other
+language(s). It involves editing the .po file.
+
+\item Compiling the .po file into .mo file to be used by the program.
+
+\item Setting the appropriate locale in your program to use the strings for the
+given language: see \helpref{wxLocale}{wxlocale}.
+
+\end{enumerate}
+