Re: Updated Package Descriptions Translations - Volunteers?

[<simos pc96 ma rhbnc ac uk>]

On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, Aaron Weber wrote:

> Hello i18n friends!
>   Those of you on the docs mailing list probably already know me, but at
> any rate, I'm Aaron Weber, tech writer for Helix Code.
>
> One of the things I'm working on is package descriptions for all of
> GNOME-- those short little one-sentence things that tell you what libfoo
> does when you look at it in dselect or whatever.  A lot of these
> descriptions are getting old, and many were never very helpful in the
> first place (Package: Foo. Description: the Foo application).  So, I've
> gone through and rewritten them all.
>
> I've got a text file of all the descriptions, and it's maybe 400 lines
> long, and would be quite simple to translate.
>
> How should I go about arranging for translations? Once given a
> translated text file, I can get everything packaged up, so it wouldn't
> be necessary to do any technical work. Should I just ask for volunteers
> here?

Since such a list will not be static in the course of time, a way
to update translations should be implemented.
One way is to reuse `gettext'.

For example, the could be a file MASTER.txt:
==== MASTER.txt ====
gnome-core "Gnome-core is core to GNOME"
gnome-libs "Basic gnome libraries"
gnome-games "Gnome GaMes"
==== END ====

This can be converted (using a Perl script) to MASTER.pot:
=== MASTER.pot ===
#, fuzzy
msgid "gnome-core Gnome-core is core to GNOME"
msgstr "gnome-core "

#, fuzzy
msgid "gnome-libs Basic gnome libraries"
msgstr "gnome-libs "

same with gnome-games...
=== END MASTER.pot ===

The Greek translator would produce el.po:
=== el.po ===
msgid "gnome-core Gnome-core is core to GNOME"
msgstr "gnome-core To Gnome-core einai kentriko kommati tou GNOME"

msgid "gnome-libs Basic gnome libraries"
msgstr "gnome-libs Basikes biblithikes tou gnome"

same with gnome-games...
=== END el.po ===

With a subsequent script, el.po can be converted to an output format,
readily available to the target application:
=== MASTER.el ===
gnome-core To Gnome-core einai kentriko kommati tou GNOME
gnome-libs Basikes biblithikes tou gnome
...
=== END MASTER.el ===

Regards,
simos