Re: minutes from GUADEC2 translation BOF

[Gediminas Paulauskas <menesis delfi lt>]

More comments from me

On 21 Apr 2001 11:54:18 +0200, Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> We agreed that the following was a good idea, and recommend
> it for inclusion in the gettext tools:
> 
> In the .po file for each message, list     
> - when spellchecked
> - when and whom reviewed
> - each line verified in run, when and by whom
> 
> Implement it as .po comment lines:
> #, spellchecked 2001-04-05 keld@dkuug.dk
> #, reviewed 2001-04-06 keld@dkuug.dk
> #, verified date email
> 
> The gettext tools should then remove these lines when
> the mesgid is changed.
> 
> We would like a windows manager for verifying the executed apps.
> Running the program and clicking a text or a whole
> page should automatically mark it as ok or wrong in the .po file.
> We thought that it would be next to impossible to have people
> do this by hand, so we need assistance from a general 
> windows manager.

It seems like adding a huge overhead to translation files and tools.

#, spellchecked 2001-04-13 jcastro@vialink.com.br
#, reviewed 2001-04-14 jcastro@vialink.com.br
#, verified 2001-04-15 another@person.linux.br
#: libgnomeui/gnome-stock.c:840 libgnomeui/stock_demo.c:144
msgid "Close"
msgstr "Uždaryti"

Looks way too verbose!

[menesis@~/cvs/gnumeric/po]$ du -h --total *.po | grep total
15M total

I do not feel like wanting to add any extra info to po files.

Adding spellchecked/reviewed date to header comment is acceptable. Then
after some time the review "expires". Don't know if this is enough for
good QA. But that proposed scheme is too expensive for public po files.
Source archives then will grow twice!

> If the error is one in translation, then the message should
> be sent to the translator, or the translator team.
> The email addres to report translation errors should be listed
> in the "about" box for all programs, and integrated in the
> bug reporting system, bug-buddy.

What is a problem with that? I remember this was discussed twice, but no
patches submitted, and still there is no info about translator in about
boxes :(

> It was proposed to give every message a message number.
> I dont think we agreed on that.

Every message can be given an ID, not a simple number, but something
like md5sum or a function used in string hashes. If message changes, the
ID does not match the translation. So that message needs review. In
*separate* file, which is not distributed, but is used only in language
group, IDs are mapped to spellchecked/reviewed info.

> 3. Use of translation memory
> 
> maybe do it automatically on CVS derived files?
> KDE has a base of text that is translated, such as 
> "yes, no, cancel". We could centrally build total
> .po files of messages. Some of the sofware here is
> real s-l-o-w tho.
> 
> 4. Use of machine translation software
> 
> There are some machine translation software around, we heard
> of one person (Antonio?) from the gnome i18n crowd that was working on
> a translation system with esparanto as an intermediate
> language. Please tell us more.

Remember someone complained that GNOME translations are so bad, someone
should be using babelfish to translate stuff? It sounds bad. Transaltion
should be machine-assisted, but still needs human interaction to review
everything. Translators of course use tools fr that, at least msgmerge
to get fuzzy translations. This is not enough of course. But cron job on
server doing translations is not acceptable.

> 6. KDE tools
> 
> Stephan Kulow from the KDE team was present and demonstrated
> some new KDE tools:
> 
>    xml2pot - turns XML documentation into maintainable .pot files.

Héctor has a tool for translating SGML docs in evolution/doc.
gtranslator has beginnings of support for transalting docbook documents.

>    kbabel - GUI translators tool, can mark partial line changes.

Yeah, very good tool. Has support for databases, i.e. translation
memory.

> 8. Use of Pango
> 
> Pango is a display toolkit for Unicode. Gnome will eventually
> use Pango (2.0?). It seems that there is no need to force everybody to
> use UTF-8 for their .po files, although it should be the end goal.

yes, if you force everyone to use UTF-8 locale, gettext converts any
files from their charset into locale's charset. No matter what charset
po files are, strings in applications should always be in UTF-8.

But KDE2 uses UTF-8 for po files, it would be better to have everything
in one charset (that's why it was invented).

-- 
Gediminas Paulauskas
Lithuanian translator of GNOME