Translators: Translation updates soon needed for upcoming release 1.0.1

[Daniel Calvelo Aros]

Hi Russel.

Not a stupid idea at all. Actually, it's the general scheme for translations
using GNU gettext (which Python uses, after a very interesting discussion on a
SIG, maybe four years ago). If you haven't used it, check it out in your spare
time. The system is very powerful. For us unix-bred people, the mixture of the
CLI tools with emacs and po-mode is very straightforward. 

Gettext is very unixish: have shell tools to generate text files, edit those
and compile appropriate files for a library to use, linked to your
application. Usually you install all the compiled translations (they don't
take much space) and are able to switch between them based on environment
variables. Since it's all text-based and the compilations may be handled by
the global application compile, it's very appropriate for CVS work. So yes,
you can have versioned translations in the same way you can have versioned
releases: it all boils down to properly handling CVS. Since I don't have CVS
access, I resort to web-grabbing and mail; the nice folks at Intevation handle
CVS from that.

There are problems, mind you: often the string-marking (using _) must be made
with translation in mind. Handling plurals, ordinals, dates may be very
different between languages. For instance, in english, the language ambiguity
allows you to use imperative in lieu of infinitive; there are no genres; there
are no declinations; phrases are always short; technical terms become standard
very quickly. Sometimes you must resort to anglicisms in translations for
space reasons, and so on. A well-done translation is very hard to do. I don't
claim five stars for mine: I should be doing user-testing, systematic
verification of tenses and maybe specialisation of some strings ("query": is
it an imperative, a title, a noun?)... 

What's very interesting in what you said is the idea of a web-based po-file
editor. I'm not aware of such a tool, but it would be a great addition to
systems like cvsweb, maven and so on.

For me, having a modem connection, downloading and uploading po files is the
most effective way to go.

PS. Loved the joke!

-- Daniel Calvelo Aros

---------- Original Message -----------
From: Russell Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com>
To: Thuban Developer Mailing List <thuban-devel at intevation.de>
Sent: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 11:43:51 -0500
Subject: Re: Translators: Translation updates soon needed for upcoming release
1.0.1

> Daniel Calvelo writes:
>  > Yes, I took the fast and easy way: downloaded the tarball from
>  > cvsweb.
> 
> I have a few years of experience with software releases, but don't
> have any experience with translations, so this may actually be a
> STOOPID suggestion: Wouldn't it be easier for translators to create
> translations against released code?  So you'd have a program release
> of X.Y, and translation releases of -trans.X.Y.Z.  First, there would
> be no time pressure ("We have the strings frozen!  Quick, translate
> them!"), because translations could be added easily.  Second, you
> could even create an automated system for translating.  Make a web
> form out of the string dictionary, with a pulldown box for the
> language being translated.  Let the user enter the translation
> strings, and automagically rebuild the -trans package.
> 
> Hmmmm.....  Actually, you could create a meta-translation package,
> which has translations for every program.  Collect all the _("x")
> strings from every program that has them, and have one package which
> has translations for everything.  It may be that the same phrase 
> could need different translations in context, but that's a minor difficulty.
> 
> But maybe this is STOOPID?  You've heard the joke:
> 
> What's the name for someone who speaks three languages?  Trilingual.
> What's the name for someone who speaks two languages?  Bilingual.
> What's the name for someone who speaks one language?  American.
> 
> -- 
> --My blog is at angry-economist.russnelson.com  | Freedom means allowing
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> 
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------- End of Original Message -------