Re: translating beast (Re: Please translate beast and bse)

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

sön 2003-10-26 klockan 17.43 skrev Tim Janik:
> however there's one issue that keeps popping up. that's missing .po files
> in po-bse/. the beast module currently has a po/ directory for the GUI a
> po-bse/ directory for the synthesis core and will get a po-plugins/ directory
> in the next few months.
> 
> unfortunately, many translators are not looking at po-* directories and thus:
> - miss out additional things that need translating
> - add their language to ALL_LINGUAS in configure.in and by that cause builds
>   to break if their language .po file is missing from po-* directories.
> 
> so for one, i'd like to remind every translator that beast has a po-bse/
> directory, but for another i'd like to raise the question whether there's
> anything package maintainers can do to remind translators of the existence
> of additional po-*/ dirs automatically.

I think this is an inherited design problem with the "many translation
domains inside the same module" approach.

Most translators are only used to the "one module - one domain" system
since the overwhelming majority of modules in GNOME CVS use that system.
I can off the top of my head only think of 2 modules, beast and gimp,
that are examples of modules that don't, and currently we have a total
of 157 modules listed in the translation status pages. So these modules
that don't use the one domain system don't exactly make a large
percentage in the total number of modules -- roughly 1%.

Also, another inherited problem with the multiple domains approach is
that the multiple po directories use different names. In close to 99% of
the cases a "cd po" is enough for the translator, but in the case of
gimp and beast they must also carefully examine what other po
directories are available and the special directories and names they use
in that particular module. We could of course extend the instructions on
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/translator.html to
also cover the special cases of beast and gimp, but I'm not sure that
making those instructions much more complicated to make them work for 1%
more modules is worth the effort.

Third, this isn't exactly a new problem, and we've discussed this with
the gimp people before. Last I heard from Sven on this subject he was
actually largely going away from the "several domains in one module"
system and in the process of splitting gimp up in several more modules,
since having everything in the same module made it difficult to
maintain, release and package the different parts independantly. So it
seems strange that you would want to go in the opposite direction with
beast.

So, to sum things up, I would propose that to facilitate this once and
for all you in beast either
1) Use one translation domain only for the beast module, or
2) Split beast up in several modules, each one with only one translation
domain.


Christian