Re: A chance to help

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On 22 Aug 2003, Cyrille Chepelov wrote:
> Le Fri, Aug 22, 2003, ï 01:25:49PM -0500, Lars Clausen a ïcrit:
>
> > > I'd add: for each Americanization patch item, it would be really nice
> > > to add an en_GB.po patch item as well. Just for symmetry's sake.
> >
> > True, but less necessary.  The Americanization is mostly to have one
> > language to base translations off of.  That way we won't have
> > mistranslations due to US/GB differences.  Also notice that the site
> > suggests always using SI units, so for units an en_US.po patch could be
> > required (not likely to be the case in Dia, though).
>
> nope, units are beyond the simple scope of the .po. Anyway, if they
> insist on using inches, pounds and whatever phase of ounces, screw
> them :-) Coca-Cola and US car makers are massively switching to metric,
> the rest will follow suit, eventually.

For Dia, yes.  Other programs might mention units in their strings, for
some reason ("Your file is now six feet under" -> "You file is now 182.88
cm under":)

> I'm thinking of another thing w.r.t the Americanization patch: to be
> complete, a patch which does, say, s/Colour/Color/ should also apply the
> patch to the msgid section of all .po files as well, otherwise it
> creates more work to the translator teams, doesn't it?

It would, but not much.  At the same time, some number of entries would be
collapsed into one (e.g. "Line color" and "Line colour"!), and I think the
translators would scream bloody murder at us doing that instead of them.
Grepping for [Cc]olour brings up 7 strings, so it's not a massive burden
compared with the mess if we start doing funny things to the .po files.  I
messed it up once, I'm quite content to leave it to the translators now.

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| HÃrdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?