Re: [gnome-cy] Kartouche, CVS, keyboards, etc.

[Kevin Donnelly <kevin dotmon com>]

Hi Dafydd

The one-man translation team, eh?  We'll have to put you and Rhoslyn 
head-to-head :-)  You've certainly been keeping me away from KDE .....

On Monday 17 March 2003 1:13 am, Dafydd Harries wrote:
> Term ended on Friday so I've had a bit of spare time to do some
> translation work, which I did using Kartouche. I've been working on the
> basis that any translation is better than no translation at all, so
> although some of the stuff I've submitted might not be very good, it
> provides a starting point for improvements.

I agree entirely - it's much easier to impove something than create it from 
scratch.  Apart from a few spelling corrections, I have just changed 
"methwyd" for "methu" throughout, and changed "sgrîngipiad" to "sgrîn-lun", 
which I quite like the sound of.  But I'm happy to be over-ruled on either.

> Here are some thoughts about Kartouche.  I'm assuming that the people
> who these suggestions are most relevant to are watching this list.

Indeed ....

> - Links are the same colour as other text. This is a big web design no-no.

Yes.  Unfortunately the default link colour doesn't go with the schema, and 
underlines even less so.  I'll have another look at the stylesheet and see if 
I can do something to address this.

> - It would be nice to have column headings ("Original", "Current
>   Translation", "Current Suggestion")

OK, I'll add that.

> - It would be nice if the checkboxes could go away, which could be done
>   by ignoring all results without non-whitespace (!/\S/) contents.
>   Implementing this, and the previous suggestion, would make the
>   interface immediately less confusing, I think, especially for people
>   like me who start playing around without reading the documentation
>   first.

Hmm.  Not so sure about this one.  I have this paranoia that when you make 
something automatic to save yourself work you go back a couple of days later 
and find it has eaten your cat.  But I can see that it would streamline 
things.  I'll do a few tests on this.  Would you like to contribute a regex 
you think will be foolproof (and I'm the fool in question, remember)?

> - What is the Specific Item thing? It complained when I tried playing
>   with it and I didn't see it documented anywhere.

Oh, I like this, it's always very well-behaved with me.  Suppose you've 
translated up to string 39 in a file.  The next day you go back and need to 
start from string 40.  You just type that into the box, press the button, and 
viola!  You can achieve much the same effect with the "show only 
untranslated" switch on the page where you select the tables, which I added 
last week, but that is more for winkling out those last few untranslated 
strings that are lurking in corners.

> - It would be nice to have a list of pages, possibly in the form of a row
>   of links in the form:
>   Jump to Messages: 1-20, 21-40, 41-60, 60-67

Yes, Chris Jackson also asked about this, but the Specific Item and Show 
Untranslated address this need.  The main reason why I didn't implement this 
is that some of the files are quite big, and if you had a list of page 
numbers you would have a ridiculous amount of them in these cases (eg 150 for 
kdelibs).  

> - It would be nice if your name is remembered. This doesn't have to be a
>   cookie, it can just be passed in to the script as a default value for
>   te text box.

Yes, I meant to add that to the Hall-of-Fame things at some point - Omnivore 
took over this week.  I'll try and do that soon. 

> - It would be nice if there was a working "show untranslated only" mode,
>   with correct paging, so that it's very easy to start filling in gaps
>   without having to wade through stuff that's already done. The page
>   list would have to cooperate with this. (That is, each page should
>   contain 20 untranslated messages, not just the untranslated messages
>   with indexes within N to N + 20, if you see what I mean.)

Yes, this is implemented if you use the "show untranslated" switch (see 
above).  Beat you to it on this one, eh?

> - More statistics would be nice, both on the Start Translating and the
>   Hall of Fame pages: specifically, number of strings translated,
>   and number of suggestions pending approval.

Well, funnily enough, on the admin bit I have implemented a "suggestions 
pending" column, and I was just about to transfer it to the userland page.  
So that's OK.  What did you have in mind for the HoF?  I was also wondering 
about implementing a "suggestions submitted today" page, which will hopefully 
show an exponential increase.  I'm going to look at that shortly.

> I might have been more inclined to actually implement some of these myself,
> but I'm afraid I harbour a strong dislike for PHP.

What?  Do my ears deceive me?  For why?  PHP is *so* cool, because twits like 
me can actually get something running very quickly, and it's very forgiving.  
It's also actually pretty reliable.  Do you do Perl, or what?  If so, beware, 
because I may send you queries about regular expressions ......

> I found the Omnivore very helpful, and it would be even better if it was
> fed translations made via Kartouche, since it would help consistency as
> well as expanding the number of things it knows about. 

Yes, it is actually amazingly useful - I didn't think it would be.  I have now 
worked out a simple way to add the KG/100 translations (eg the translations 
in all the 100% files were swept in last night, so we now have nearly 8,000 
entries there now).  At the minute this is done manually, because I need to 
add another field to the tables, and I don't want to mess things until I've 
tested it, but since all it requires is ticking a box and pressing a button, 
this is not difficult.  I want to add Rhoslyn's MDK files today, and Dewi's 
Moz files later (they will be based on the downloadable web-page, so they 
will not be perfect - in particular, I've noticed some of the longer entries 
are truncated).  I will also add the file available at freedict.org, but this 
has only about 800 general words, and some of them are a bit suspect.  Still, 
all grist to the mill.

> Maybe it should
> even keep track of failed searches since they will probably indicate
> where there are gaps. 

Yes, I had dismissed that, but I've just thought of a simple way it could be 
done.  The slight problem is that to get the best out of this, you'd need to 
tie the Kartouche front-end onto Omnivore, which should be easy, but would 
take a bit of time to sort out.  So the ability for users to add to Omnivore 
itself probably won't appear for a while.  But then the key aim is a Welsh 
desktop, not a Welsh dictionary, so that's probably OK.

> Oh, and also: can it not open in a new window? To
> my mind, if people want a page in a new window they will take the
> trouble of asking the browser for it explicitly, and people who want it
> to open in a new tab have to ask for that explicitly anyway.

Ah, interesting.  The way I use it is to have a Kartouche window, and an 
Omnivore window, because it really bugs me when I click on a link and it eats 
my existing window and I have to click Back to get back to it, and then the 
Omnivore window has disappeared again, and then I have to get *it* back, and 
so on.  I know new windows can confuse people ('ere, where's me translations 
gone? I can't click back ...) so that's why I flag the new window.  It would 
be even better if you could get IE and Moz to open at a smaller size 
(Konqueror does this, but I can't see where you would set the other to to do 
so - in the HTML possibly - I shall have to look at that) - that would make 
it clear to people that this was just an adjunct to the main KG/100 page.

> Again, I have to say that, on the whole, I am very pleased that Kartouche
> exists and like it a lot. I'm also very happy that the KDE and Gnome
> efforts are coordinating with each other, since this can only make our
> respective projects easier and our results more consistent.

Good :-)  It's certainly doing wonders for my tech Welsh - I'm going around 
now saying "rhaglennig" to everyone.

> I'm a little fuzzy on the relationship between Kartouche and Gnome
> CVS. Are the strings in Kartouche taken from HEAD? How are new
> versions of messages handled? How do strings get from Kartouche into
> CVS? It would be nice if CVS were not far behind Kartouche, since it
> means that the GTP's statistics will be up-to-date.

Well, I received my Gnomeries from the estimable Mr Cox, so I can't say, I'm 
afraid.  I intend in the next couple of days to send him the 100% Gnome files 
to do whatever is best with them (although I may keep them on KG/100 for a 
while pour encourager les autres).  I am hoping he will not come back and say 
"I've just discovered a show-stopping error in the exports you sent me" .....

I am also trying to read up on CVS myself, so that I can start a tree for 
Kartouche - I have a testing version, a deployed version, and a downloadable 
version, and it's beginning to get a bit difficult knowing what has been 
copied to what.  So if anyone wants to volunteer to answer a few (not many) 
questions ....

> It would be nice if we could start using intermediate results. I think
> using a partial translation (with non-translated messages left in
> English) would help give a feel for the status of the project and
> indicate problems with existing translations sooner. What needs to be
> done to make this happen? I run latest versions of Gnome, so I suppose
> that I might be able to start using stuff we put in CVS if they get put
> in newer releases. What do I need to do to tell Gnome to give me its
> messages in Welsh? Is it just a matter of setting some environment
> variables? And what about people who aren't necessarily running Gnome
> versions that are so up-to-date? Is there an easy way for them to
> install the translations and start using them?

Others will be able to answer this.  It would certainly be a good way of 
testing things before a "big bang" at the Eisteddfod.

> A tangential thing: the name "Gyfieithu" bothers me a bit since it makes
> me think "Camdreiglad!" when I hear it. (Or when I read it, for that
> matter.) Besides the fact that the whole "it's a KDE thing so it'll
> start with a K/it's a Gnome thing so it'll start with a G" thing annoys
> me anyhow. But that's just me being pedantic.

(Un)fortunately, I have just given a lengthy explanation on what KDE and Gnome 
are to my 12-year old son (although he's been using KDE for a year), so I 
need to keep KGyfieithu as a handy mnemonic ...

> 	xmodmap -e 'keycode 66 = Multi_key' <etc>

Well, I think the ability to use tô-bachs so easily on all the vowels except w 
and y is great, so this is enough for me at the minute.  I discussed this 
with Dewi, and the variability in how w-to-bach and y-to-bach are represented 
between systems led me to the compromise on KG/100 - use aeiou-to-bach, and 
w^,y^.  This is far from perfect, but hopefully the former will display OK on 
most things, and it is clear what the latter are.  At some point it would 
then be a simple matter to do a search-and-replace to change them for the 
proper code.  But I'm a bit vague on all these encoding things, so if anyone 
has anything better to suggest, fine.

Thank you for your comments - my only concern at the moment is that I will 
soon be known as the person who did NOT translate KDE :-(

Best wishes

Kevin


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