Babel: What's next?

Daniel Vainsencher danielv at netvision.net.il
Fri Oct 3 23:32:10 UTC 2003


diegogomezdeck at consultar.com wrote:
> BTW, What about including all the languages and the translator's tool in
> the full image?
Languages - sounds like a good idea. Translators tool, seems to me too
specialized, but I don't have hard opinions about the full image. Of
course, we can only decide things once the package are up and applicable
to stock images.

> I'm going to prepare a new changeset with the current version. Please wait
> for 1 or 2 days.
Sure. 

> Let's go step by step.  Let's work on bare-babel first, then the
> image-translation and then theeToys.  Do you agree?
Sure, I'm all for the step by step transition. 
 
> > Scott brought up an alternative approach which makes the widgets
> > translation aware, so that applications can get translation benefits
> > with less changes. I like this approach. Note that GNU uses gettext, for
> > example, which makes strings translatable with 3 additional characters
> > per string - we should also strive to add a minimal burden on the
> > applications. Even if you're willing to do the work for the stuff in the
> > image, this needs to be maintained, and there is also a whole bunch of
> > Smalltalk code out there that will need to be translatable. So putting
> > some thought into minimizing the requirements from the applications is
> > worth while.
> 
> I'm still not sure if this option will pay extra benefits. As I explained
> before,translation-in-the-widgets is not enough to solve all the cases.  If we
> stick ontranslation-before-the-widgets we'll have more involved methods but a
> simpler concept.
..
> I have not problem to work on it but ONLY if this make sense.  From the
> "framework" point ofview the work is, at least, more complex because we have to support both
> ideas.
I'll explain - I think we won't know what the tradeoffs are without
trying both options a little bit. If you can integrate Scott's proposal,
we can see where that puts us. You don't need to solve all the problems,
that's what we'll be able to see and think about by doing the
comparison. So I know this is a little extra work and its pretty likely
that some of it will be wasted. But I think it will leave us all more
satisfied that we're doing the right thing. If we're lucky, it might
save work in translatability for other applications, which will be a big
payoff in the future, because more applications will be translated. So
you decide if you think this makes sense.

> Sure! Thank you very much!!
Thank you, I think you're doing really important work.

Daniel



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