Re: ACLs and translation

[Dennis Bjorklund <db zigo dhs org>]

On 5 Mar 2001, Karl Eichwalder wrote:

> > It's not enough to just get a po file and translate. It's better then
> > nothing but it does not give a good translation. We need translations
> > with a high quality.
>
> Yes, but the translator is not responsible for testing per se.  In
> practice you're right :)
>
> BTW, it would help a lot to ask the hackers to add comments if you've
> found a message hard to translate.  Otherwise the next translation team
> will struggle there, too.

To create comments you need the cvs tree and somewhere to send the patch. I
don't really care if I have access to the cvs-tree myself. Any scheme
which involves just getting a .po file to translate is broken. Even
translations needs to be tested and I can think of many, many times where
I have been reading the code to understand how a string is used, just to
know how it should be translated.

Emacs has this nice feature that when you are in a .po file standing on
a string to translate it can open and jump to the correct place in the
code for you.

One thing that is also needed is the ability to put comments for the
translators on strings in glade and a simple change to xml-i18n-tools so
that the comment is included in the .po file. It's a simple thing to add
to both glade and xml-i18n-tools. And while one are there working one
might also put in a boolean to indicate if an entry should be translated
or not.  Now there is a hack in xml-i18n-tools that for labels when the
string is one of label0 to label9 it's not translated (label10 and after
are translated due to a bug in xml-i18n-tools)

Bugzilla for mozilla at least have this nice feature where you can see the
last days checkins. Would it be to much work for a maintainer to either
read a cvs-commit mailing list or look on a web page like the one mozilla
has? Of course this does not mean that people should just commit stuff,
but to rule out accidents.

As always, cvs is NOT to be used instead of communication. That's not the
problem cvs solves.

-- 
/Dennis