> Has anyone written shell scripts that can be translated into non-English
> languages?  I am only interested in translation for prompts and

Use external files which contains the messages, prompts, etc. I wrote a small example script for you. It uses a file where the messages are stored by number. A record look like this : number=text At the beginning of the script, all messages are read into a one- dimentional array and the index-numbers are stored in contants. Change the line MsgFile="English.dat" when you want to use other files with messages in other languages.

Below are the two necessary files, 1st the script and the 2nd is the English.dat file.

#
# The script
#

#!/usr/bin/ksh

# Message contants
msg_info="1"
msg_prompt="2"
msg_success="3"
msg_failure="4"
msh_end="5"

# The message file
MsgFile="English.dat"

# Use grep to ignore comment- and empty lines
grep -Ev '^#|^[ ]*$' ${MsgFile} | while read MsgLine
do
   Messages[${MsgLine%%=*}]="${MsgLine##*=}"
done

# The part of the script which actually uses the messages
echo "${Messages[${msg_info}]}"
printf "${Messages[${msg_prompt}]}" ; read Value
case "${Value}" in
   y|Y) echo "${Messages[${msg_success}]}" ;;
     *) echo "${Messages[${msg_failure}]}" ;;
esac

echo "${Messages[${msg_end}]}"

#
# English.dat
#

1=This is a script with multi-language support
2=Don't you think it's a nice script (Y/N) ? :
3=I thought so !
4=That's to bad !
5=This is the end of the script - bye.