difficulties with Gnome Translation

[Isam Bayazidi <bayazidi arabeyes org>]

Hi all
  OK I guess that some knows that Arabic in a new comer to Gnome, and we at 
Arabeyes ( www.arabeyes.org) are trying to get that new comer a place in 
Gnome. Translation project in Arabeyes had been there for 8 months, where it 
helped getting Arabic language with KDE3 (Translated around 26000+ strings). 
And we are hoping to get an Arabic interface for Gnome in the releases that 
comes after the 2.0 ..
  nevertheless it seems that the different ways of handling translation files 
and i18n issues between KDE and Gnome caused us a slow start, things that we 
found to be complicated:
- Template files (POT) are available through http rather than CVS.
- Template files that are available through http have inconsistent file names, 
they are names : modulename.cvstag.pot .. and the cvs tag could be HEAD or 
any Tag, knowing that each module got it's own tag.. while all KDE modules 
are taged with the same tag name each release ..
- Translated PO files are inconsistent places in the module tree, checking in 
changes is not an easy job.

Please do not understand that I am to compare between KDE and Gnome, I truly 
like the Gnome way, and highly appreciate everyones efforts in making this 
great environment.. but I wanted to express the difficulties we faced moving 
from KDE Traslation to Gnome Translation .. and with all my respect to 
everyones effort, it seems that KDE did a great job i18n wise and that lead 
to have around 50 languages shiped with the latest KDE 3 release.. The KDE 
team realised that the ones that are doing Translation work are translators, 
not developers, and facilitated the translation job for them..

-- 
Yours,
Isam Bayazidi
Amman - Jordan
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 Think Linux + Think Arabic = Think www.arabeyes.org
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