Re: difficulties with Gnome Translation

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

lör 2002-04-27 klockan 18.22 skrev Stanislav Visnovsky:
> But a large number of them are trying to be a part of the official GNOME
> (I think those on "unstable" for GNOME 2). All these should TRY to use
> the same branches (as is partially done for GNOME 1.4).

Yeah, I think it's unfortunate that the current GNOME unstable status
contains items that will not officially be part of core GNOME 2.0 (for
example modules that will be in Fifth Toe). I think this should be
seperate reports.


> > > - Translated PO files are inconsistent places in the module tree, checking in
> > > changes is not an easy job.
> >
> > How is this? I'm not aware of any module that doesn't use
> > module_name/po/ for storing po files, except gnome-i18n but that's a
> > very special case anyway.
> 
> and GIMP.

Yeah, but GIMP is not GNOME (if you say anything different you will get
a lot of angry Gimp people hunting you ;)


> In KDE CVS, there is a module kde-i18n. Each team has its own
> subdirectory, e.g. "sk". There is also a "templates" subdirectory, where
> are stored all POTs from the whole CVS by their relative placement (module
> name / directory in the module ), e.g. kdebase/kcontrol.pot.
> 
> The translated files are stored in the same structure but in the team's
> directory. For example, Slovak translation of KControl is in
> kde-i18n/sk/messages/kdebase/kcontrol.po
> (don't care about "messages" ATM). This makes it easy to create a packages
> for a given team, but it makes pretty hard to make a release of an
> application with all its translations (KDE releases the whole suite, GNOME
> CVS is more fragmented as I've pointed out already).
> 
> Then, there is a file desktop.po, which contains all the translatable
> parts of .desktop files. In GNOME, we've got intltools to get this into PO
> itself. The .desktop files are regularly updated at KDE CVS.
> 
> The kdelibs.po file contains all messages from KDElibs. These will show in
> the application as when the app uses standard KDE library. This is how KDE
> gets the consistent translation. The most used texts are stored in
> kdelibs!

This is also how it's done in GNOME -- developers can choose from the
"stock" menus for example (in that case they will be translated
centrally) or use their own (in that case it will be localized in the
application).


> In fact, GNOME 2 is heading in the same direction via all those
> libgnome... libbonobo...

This was also the situation before, but maybe it's more apparent in
GNOME 2.


> etc. But in GNOME, the consistency is pretty hard
> to get, since the number of libraries is very large.

Perhaps... in any case, the use of translation memories should help
consistency.


> In summary, KDE centralized approach makes it easy for translator to get
> the work done. All other parts are scripts and a few great, hard working
> guys. You can translate each app on its own, provided you have already
> translated kdelibs.po.

Great.


> In GNOME, the translator needs to know CVS a bit better, needs to update
> ChangeLogs, configure.in (!!), typically POTFILES.in etc. Then, there is
> that gnome-i18n (but that's another story).

How is the handlling of configure.in done in KDE? Is it scripts or does
someone else have to add it manually? In this case, I prefer manually
editing myself, because then I know that the current CVS version and all
subsequent releases *will* use my translation, and not depend on someone
else remembering to enable it.


> Now back to that "messages" subdirectory. KDE uses poxml application to
> convert DocBook documentation into PO-files and vice versa. Again,
> there are automatic scripts to create the translated documentation and
> put it into correct place in CVS.

This looks very interesting. I think we discussed this with the KDE
developer but if I remember correctly there was some technical reason
that the KDE solution to this couldn't automatically be used by GNOME.


> The DocBook/PO conversion makes the difference. I've translated over 50
> application manuals in KDE myself this way, since I can use the PO tools
> (translation memory etc). Are those doctools in GNOME CVS about the same
> process?

I don't know, but I don't think so. I agree, being able to convert docs
to and from po format is important to be able to translate and maintain
doc translations.


> If you have any questions, please ask. But I think, GNOME can reach
> similar ease for translators and retain the current fragmented
> development approach.

Ok. Thanks for the feedback.


> BTW, in KDE the languages MUST reach a defined level of completeness to be
> distributed = 100% of kdelibs.po, desktop.po and 80% (or 100%?) of
> all POT files in kdebase. There is 71 teams listed at
> http://i18n.kde.org/teams/index.php.

This sounds similar to the GNOME rules -- I think we have decided in the
past that to be "supported" a translation must reach 75% status. Sadly,
i18n.gnome.org seems to be non-functional, so I cannot check for sure.


Christian