[Etoys] Translations

[Takashi Yamamiya]

Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> A help to potential translators would be if the generated POT file  
> would include comments explaining the context in which the original  
> phrase appeared.

I think Squeak's translation system and LanguageEditor was designed
strongly influenced by gettext at first (am I correct, Diego?). But
folloing people including me have implemented it worse. I regret so
many bad decisions in LanguageEditor.  One example is, we use

"Hello world!" translated

instead of _("Hello world!"). That's good. But if we use a variable as
the receiver like:

someVariable translated

We can't extract keywords by a program. That's nonsense. The first
step would be fix those. Basic import / export mechanism have been
already on Squeak. (Another bad decision was to invent an original
file-out style export format. I should have taken only gettext format
from the beginning).

> Any volunteer? Should we ask the broader Squeak community for help?

It is very worthwhile task.

Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
> The problem using Gettext with Squeak, is that Gettext is not its
> native system for translation. When using Gettext with GNU application
> you benefice from the its tool suite: when messages are updated, it is
> able to mark changed messages as fuzzy and/or to propose a closer
> match. I don't know if it is applicable to Squeak, and what is
> necessary to do to make the best use of the whole gettext tool suite.

That's interesting. We should have those feature.

> Regarding translation, another stuff it will be nice is language
> catalogue per Squeak Application. It is not unrealistic
> people/organisation/vendor will develop Squeak application (applet,
> extension or whatever it should be nammed) for the OLPC.
> In this case this organisation will also need to ship language
> catalogue with their Squeak Application. It is also what Gettext
> provides.

That's a good idea. What's your definition of Squeak Application? I
think a .pr whould be a good unit.

Cheers,
- Takashi