Hi Marcus,

> Hi,
> 
> So now we finally have the Babel-translation changes in the 3.7a image.

We reached a milestone, It's great!

> What's the next step now?

- Make the image *full* translatable.  In Small-Land we focus on users
and not on deep-squeakers so the Class Browser, the ChangeSorters, the
Inspector/Explorer, etc are not translatable yet.

- Make the external packages translatable.  SqueakMap is one of these. 
Celeste, Scamper, The Games, etc also.

- Refactor eToys vocabulary to use babel and remove the current/old
schema.  Doing this Squeak will be fully translatable by
non-programmers.

- Publish the LanguageEditor on SqueakMap and make it a part of the full
version.

- I'm planning to create the needed Language subclass from the
LanguageEditor (In the same line than before: Translating Squeak has to
be a posible for non-programmers).

- We're also working in an exporter/importer of .po/.pot (the gettext
format).  The idea is to use the existing translation tools (like
KBabel, etc).  There are also some web-based tools based on .po files
with the goal of making the translation a team-job.

- Include m17n. Languages with characters not covered by MacRoman needs
this.

> We have had a lot of people volonteering for doing translations. Most
> of them are not die-hard squeak hackers. So we need to find a way to
> make it *really* easy to contribute to the translation effort.

I full agree!

> So: What would somebody need to do to contribute? we need a *good*
> tutorial that describes the process step-by-step.

We (small-land) wrote something that can be considered the starting
point.  See it at: http://swiki.agro.uba.ar/small_land/191

> A second question is the Users point of view:
> 
> Where will the translations end up? Will they be added to the image or 
> will
> people (who so not now english!) need to start the PackageLoader and 
> load
> the translation? This is not an option. 

The full image, imho, has to be full multi-language.

> The best would be to have 
> Squeak start
> up with the language of the Host-OS. So people wouldn't have to do 
> anything
> to get their prefered language.

This is a really good idea.

Q: We need to ask the VM for the preferred language?

>       Marcus
> 
> --
> Marcus Denker marcus at ira.uka.de

Cheers,

-- 
Diego Gomez Deck
http://www.small-land.org