[Evolution-hackers] Re: Translating Welcome Message

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan)]

Today at 23:18, Christian Rose wrote:

> Would there be *any* way to enable translation of the welcome mail from
> a po file, i.e. some way to keep the welcome mail source strings in a
> format that intltool can read, and from where translated mails can be
> generated at build time?

That worries me too, and I even checked how it looked when it was
mentioned last time.  Unfortunately, it uses the MIME message format,
which hardly fits any pattern.   It's a multipart message, meaning it
contains plain-text, as well as HTML content.  Besides, we'd need
MIME headers translated.

This would benefit from custom approach so much: I'd suggest creating
a couple of files.  A plain-content.h which would contain all the
plain content strings and Subject, From fields or their parts.
Another file, eg. html-content.html.in can be already used with
intltool as XML file, so it shouldn't be a problem.  Next, you'd need
to merge this into resulting MIME messages for each language in Evo
build system.

Second approach would be keeping all the strings in an .xml.in file,
and doing some XSLT or whatever post-processing to produce MIME
messages.


OTOH, as one of intltool maintainers, I can offer creating a separate
text-format for such purposes.  Eg. having something like

  From: @translate{The Evolution Team} <evo-hackers ximian com>
  Subject: @translate{Welcome to Evolution}
  Content-type: mime/multipart; boundary=blah
  blah
  Content-type: text/plain
  @translate{Hi there blah blah.
  This and that.}
  ...
  blah
  Content-type: text/plain
  <p>@translate{Hi there blah <a href="yeah">blah</a>. This and that.}</p>
  ...

And have intltool-merge produce translated sr/welcome-mail,
sv/welcome-mail, etc.  If Evolution hackers prefer this format,
please open a bug for intltool, and we'll discuss the specifics
there (such as the syntax, needed features, etc.).

This would be, of course, evo 2.2 material.  Also note that intltool
already supports RFC822-style messages, but suited only for some kinds
of Debian files (I don't know much about them).  The advantage of
this approach is that it would work for any text file format where
one wants single file per translation.


Cheers,
Danilo