Thanks a lot for your answers!

>From what I understand, it would be easy enough to set the "gettext
path" as the standard path for translations in Squeak. And it would be
indeed very welcome to rely on Pottle to store the different
translations.

We could use the already existing PO files produced for Etoys (and
concerning the French version, the PO file available on Pottle is much
more recent than the current Squeak translation) and if we can
separate these PO file, we could maybe share a common squeak-base.po
and add a specific etoys.po for the Etoys.

Which steps must be undertaken for the gettext solution to be actually set up?

Cheers,
Severin

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 03:24, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
> 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 -
>
>
>
>