Gettext is great, but you have to be carefull when splitting the translation effort. Some of the translators will use a text editor on Mac, some in Windows and other with Linux. it will result in translation with different encoding and carriage return rules. So when merging back some attention is necessary, but it is workable. If there are not much to translate, using directly Squeak and its Language editor is much faster.
I faced this problem when a few years ago we did the effort to translate Squeak in French. I splitted the export .po file from the language editor in small pieces to share the translation load in the community, then merge back.
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.
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.
Hilaire
2007/6/28, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de:
We should make use of the OLPC/Fedora translation efforts. For this, we need to export the strings to be translated as a POT file (see msg below). Then translation can happen independently of Squeak tools.
POT files are very simple text files:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettext
A help to potential translators would be if the generated POT file would include comments explaining the context in which the original phrase appeared.
Any volunteer? Should we ask the broader Squeak community for help?
- Bert -
Begin forwarded message:
From: Marco Pesenti Gritti mpg@redhat.com Date: June 28, 2007 10:35:38 GMT+02:00 To: Sugar Mail List sugar@laptop.org Subject: [sugar] Translations
Hello,
I added a page to the wiki with instructions for activity translations (for both developers and translators).
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_Translations
The process will be refined as the Fedora translations web site improves but what we have now should be enough to start.
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