Re: i18n of Turtle files for xesam project?

["Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen" <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

2007/5/26, Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>:

Στις 26-05-2007, ημέρα Σαβ, και ώρα 10:19 +0200, ο/η Mikkel Kamstrup
Erlandsen έγραψε:
> Hi Gnomers,
>
> I also sent this mail to gnome-i18n a few days ago without any replies
> and the xesam project[1] badly needs feedback from enlightened people.
>
> Here's the case. We need a way for describing our ontology and one of
> the runner up candidates is a subset of the Turtle syntax[2]. The
> files describing the ontology would then resemble:
>
> START_FILE
>
> @prefix DC:   <http://freedesktop.org/standards/DC#>
> @prefix xesam:        <
> http://freedesktop.org/standards/xesam#>
> @prefix :     <
> http://freedesktop.org/standards/xesam_base#>
>
> xesam:Audio.Composer
>       a               :field;
>       :of_type        :string;
>       :has_parent     DC:Creator;
>       :name           "Composer"@EN;
>       :name           "Komponist"@DA;
>
>       :description    "Audio composer".
>
> xesam:Audio.Artist
>       a               :field;
>       :of_type        :string;
>       :has_parent     DC:Creator;
>       :name           "Artist"@EN;
>       :name           "Kunstner"@DA;
>       :description    "Performer featuring in the recording"@EN;
>
>       :description    "Kunster der optræder på optagelsen"@DA.
>
> <more like this>
> END_FILE
>
> As you can guess the translations are marked with @ after the strings.
>
> My question is : Will this cause problems or be a major hassle? How
> will it fit into the current translation workflow?

Currently, the gnome i18n workflow can easily use .xml and .po files.
For other file formats there will be need for quite some extra work.
Thus, if you would like to use your proposed file format, you would need
to update http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/intltool/ Of course, contact the
maintainer of intltool first.

AFAIK, if intltool can parse your files, they will fit with the workflow
of GNOME.

Ok thanks for the tip :-)

How about the way fx .desktop files are handled? The translations are inlined in the .desktop files and that's also the way Turtle does it (see above example). So my concerns where about:

 - I'm not keen on requiring the translators to understand yet-another-format, so I'm not keen on the translators having to resort to raw file editing

 - How hard would it be to make intltool extract the Turtle translation templates? Is there no way to tell intltool "use this external program to extract translation templates"? I've been browsing around the source and I can't find any clean way to extend it...

Cheers,
Mikkel