Translations

National Language Support, or NLS, means that a program’s informational, warning and error strings are stored in a message catalog which can be translated into the native language of the program’s users. Beginning with version 1.8.2, sudo supports NLS using the gettext family of functions.

NLS Translations for sudo are coordinated through the Translation Project.

If you would like to contribute a translation for sudo, please join a translation team at the Translation Project instead of contributing a .po file directly. This will avoid duplicated work if there is already a translation in progress. If you would like to become a member of a translation team, please follow the instructions for translators.

The messages in sudo are split into two domains: sudo and sudoers. The former is used by the sudo front-end and utility functions. The latter is used by the sudoers policy and I/O logging plug-ins as well as the sudoers-specific commands visudo and sudoreplay.

Sudo uses the gettext family of functions to look up strings in the message catalog. These functions are included in the C library on Linux and Solaris systems. Other systems may need to install GNU gettext to get NLS support. Sudo will include NLS by default if the gettext function is found in either the C library or the libintl library.