[etoys-dev] Re: [squeak-dev] Localization for Squeak products

Yoshiki Ohshima yoshiki at vpri.org
Tue Jan 19 08:14:06 UTC 2010


At Mon, 18 Jan 2010 23:20:17 -0800,
Andreas Raab wrote:
> 
> Hi Yoshiki -
> 
> A couple more questions:
> >   The created .pot file is uploaded to an online translation site that
> > uses Pootle.  The volunteers provides the translation and at the
> > release build time, we collect the translation, compile them to the
> > .mo files.  GetTextTranslator, a subclass of
> > NaturalLanguageTranslator, opens the .mo file and looks up the
> > translation of given string from it.
> 
> Can you point me to the site where the translations are hosted?

It is here:

http://translate.sugarlabs.org/

> > Also, a phrase is used in different way and not being able to
> > translate it differently is a problem.  We thought of several ways to
> > solve this problem...  One was to modify these words in the source
> > code (e.g. a phrase like "start" to "start (verb)" and "start (noun)")
> > but it would have resulted in invalidating a lot of volunteer work and
> > having to provide the English translation.  If Pootle was flexible, we
> > could have an annotation to each phrase to indicate its use (still
> > would have required source change), but didn't happen.  Splitting the
> > phrases into different text domains was another possibility and it is
> > good for other reason (korakurider has the code even) but didn't
> > happen for various reasons.
> 
> I'm not sure what "splitting this into different text domains" means in 
> this context. How much of a problem is the issue of translating phrases 
> differently in practice? Does it happen to pretty much everyone right 
> away or is that an occasional gotcha that people just work around the 
> best they can?

  The text domain is a feature of gettext.  We still stick all phrases
into one domain but if there was a good boundary to split the phrases,
it would have been useful for easing Pootle server workload,
volunteers perception, and implicitly disambiguate some phrases.

  But this kind of disambiguation was not big, compared to the lack of
inflection support it seems.  Workarounds included to edit one
occurence of 'start' with ' start ' and provide different translations
for 'start' and ' start ' etc. but real support for plural (and
gender... which is much harder) would have been good.

> >   (I thought we started out from 4,000 or such phrases for Etoys, but
> > now it appears to have 27,000 or such.  Not sure what it means...)
> 
> It's probably just more coverage.

  IIRC, I thought it was around 10,000 or such at one point.  Since
it's been automatic, the increase from there is not clear to me why...

> >> * How does localized deployment work with Etoys? I.e., what are the 
> >> options for providing localized downloads vs. downloading all supported 
> >> locales and switching dynamically upon startup?
> > 
> >   In general, we bundle these .mo files in the single release.  Upon
> > startup, GetTextTranslator scans the specified directory for available
> > languages and show them in the menu.  (And trys to switch to the
> > system language.)
> 
> What are .mo files? How do they relate to .pot files?

.pot is the template file in text format.  A volunteer edits the file
with a generic or special editor for editing .pot to make a .po file,
which is in the same text format but with translation interleaved.
Then a command compiles a .po file to a binary file (.mo file) for
faster access.

> >> * Generally speaking, how do people feel about localization in Etoys? Is 
> >> it considered to work well, or is it considered to be a painful process? 
> >> Are there any obvious alternatives one should look at?
> > 
> >   This is subjective, but I thought the process overall worked pretty
> > good, given that volunteers all over the place.
> 
> That's kind of what I was asking for. Put differently, if you had the 
> choice between the current approach and some alternative, would you drop 
> the current version no questions asked, or would you likely say "you 
> know what, it's worked for us". From the sound of it it's the
> latter.

  Yes.  For Etoys, if we had incoporated korakurider's other attempts
to disambiguate phrases earlier it would have been better but without
such it provided a usable system.  I had some reservations earlier
when going to gettext; I didn't see the idea of getting translations
from people who don't know Etoys a good one, but the scalability of
workflow paid off.

  Again for Telespace, the translation will be done by people who know
the application, but not necessarily people who can open the Squeak
System Browser and look at the code.  In that setting, going to an
external tool makes sense and then gettext is pretty solid.

  Supporting more gettext features such as plural support etc. would
be a plus.

> Thanks this is all very useful info!

  No problem!

-- Yoshiki

  I'm staying up later than usual, as I realized that the script of
the Avatar movie is available online.  It clears up some of the
questions I had...



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