Gerd Schauffelberger introduces a new package today as a part of his work with the pat-tools group - the patI18n package for internationalization.

In lack of a better idea, I founded a new PAT Package: patI18n. So far this package is just a draft and only exists in the SVN repository. As you might guess, patI18n is an abstraction layer for translating issues. Therefore it provides nearly the same interface as the famous GNU Gettext. Still, the actual translation is done by a chain of modules - this way everything is possible and the design stays open to new ideas.

He talks briefly about how it came to be and how it varies from some of the more traditional language translation tools. You can check out the example on his development environment or just use the snv details provided to grab the latest copy.