en_GB translations (was Re: GNOME 2.2 Translation Statistics and Rankings)

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

fre 2003-01-31 klockan 02.02 skrev iain:
> 
> > 54	en_GB	1.48	Unsupported		52		-2
> 
> I'm just wondering about how en_GB is calculated in this list as the
> majority of strings don't need translated.

Currently, the stats for en_GB are counted the same way as for every
other translation, for various practical reasons. The tools count
non-fuzzy, non-empty msgstrs as translated and it would be difficult to
do special manual exceptions to this, if not even impossible since
there's no way to automatically distinguish between non-translated,
non-verified stuff and "no-need-for-translation" stuff that was left
empty.

As for every other translation, messages that haven't been given
attention either have an empty msgstr or are marked fuzzy. Translated
messages that have been translated or checked are non-empty and
non-fuzzy. Messages that don't need a translation into the other
language usually only have the contents of the msgid copied into the
msgstr unchanged by the translator, so that there is an indication that
these messages have been taken care of and checked (even if the
"translation" didn't envolve any actual translation in these cases) and
will be counted as translated.

The only special thing about en_GB in this is that instead of a minority
of the messages it's the majority of messages that don't need any actual
translation, and that thus the majority of msgstrs only need to get
filled with the unchanged value of the msgids. Newer gettext versions
even have a special tool to help en translators with this:

    $ msgen --help
    Usage: msgen [OPTION] INPUTFILE
    
    Creates an English translation catalog.  The input file is the last
    created English PO file, or a PO Template file (generally created by
    xgettext).  Untranslated entries are assigned a translation that is
    identical to the msgid, and are marked fuzzy.

This way, the en_GB translator doesn't need to manually copy the
contents of the individual msgids into the msgstrs all the time when he
or she translates or verifies the translation of messages; only
un-fuzzying the messages is required to indicate they have been
verified. And when the msgstrs are un-fuzzied and non-empty it's clear
that they have been verified by an en_GB translator. Unfortunately,
currenly that just isn't the case for 98.52% of the en_GB messages.


Christian