On 18.05.2009, at 17:13, Ian Trudel wrote:

> Hello Séverin,
>
> This is really sad nobody has replied to you. I am also concerned by
> localization support in Squeak. And it's all true: the French version
> isn't that great. It would be easy to port gettext classes from Etoys
> to Squeak.

I think so, yes. Also, the Etoys translation covers pretty much the  
whole image, including the development tools, so a very large portion  
of translation work is already done.

> However, one problem with the approach is the lack of support for
> categories. It means one gets a big dictionary of system wide
> sentences.

Well, actually, it supports per-package (= system category)  
translation files. Only if no translation file for a specific category  
is found, it falls back to the main translation file.

For Etoys we just decided to not split it (although initially we did)  
because having many po files is unwieldy too.

A bigger problem is the still-missing context support. You sometimes  
want to translate the same English phrase differently depending on the  
context (e.g., "copy" can be a verb or noun) and currently all of  
these uses are mashed together.

But despite all the shortcomings it does work and got us a completely  
translated app.

> It's an unfriendly combination with the monolithic design
> of gettext. The language editor is also pretty bad, nothing to compare
> with, say, POEdit.

For the PO files you can use any editor you want. The in-image editor  
is only for the old translation system.

> We would also have to find a repository to store language files (e.g.
> PO gettext files). Anyway, I don't think there is any translation
> workflow at all. No plan. No nothing. =)


For Etoys we use Sugar Labs' "Pootle" installation:

http://translate.sugarlabs.org/projects/etoys/

It allows to translate online, or upload PO files.

- Bert -