To translate any text, we must be able to discover the source domain of the text. A source domain is an identifier that identifies a project that produces program source strings. Source strings occur as literals in python programs, text in templates, and some text in XML data. The project implies a source language and an application context.

We can think of a source domain as a collection of messages and associated translation strings.

We often need to create unicode strings that will be displayed by separate views. The view cannot translate the string without knowing its source domain. A string or unicode literal carries no domain information, therefore we use messages. Messages are unicode strings which carry a translation source domain and possibly a default translation. They are created by a message factory. The message factory is created by calling MessageFactory with the source domain.

This package provides facilities for declaring such messages within program source text; translation of the messages is the responsiblitiy of the 'zope.i18n' package.

Please see http://docs.zope.org/zope.i18nmessageid/ for the documentation.