Re: gnome-i18n digest, Vol 1 #1523 - 5 msgs

[Javier SOLA <javier khmeros info>]

Adam,

With all respect.

You are probably a computer scientist (all the e-mail addresses in your 
signature give you away :-) ) used to work with Open Source. To you:

    * Make sure the file is encoded in UTF-8 (for GNOME2/GTK2 software)
    * Make sure the file passes the "msgfmt -cv xy.po" test

makes sense.

To somebody here in Cambodia, Bhutan or in the Pacific islands, 
countries (with very few computer scientists) that are now starting 
localisation- this is Chinese. If they want to translate Gnome, their 
only chance is to translate the files and then give them to somebody who 
will insert them in CVS for them. This concept of concentrating 
technical resources for several countries is being talked about a lot in 
Asia at this moment.

My suggestion was on this line of not forcing people to count with 
technical resources until they have to, and really differenciating 
between what is considered as a translator in Christian's document (a 
translator that has enough knowledge of Linux to know about CVS, 
Gettext, know how to find and use Inttools)... and a simple translator 
that will only know how to use an editor (even a specialised po editor) 
and maybe a translation memory system, after some training... but not a 
command line operating system.

Somebody else... probably in another country, will take care of 
committing and updating the files.

Javier


Adam Weinberger wrote:

>>>(04.01.2004 @ 2057 PST): Javier SOLA said, in 1.6K: <<
>>>      
>>>
>>My proposal is in relation to new people who now nothing about CVS, but 
>>want to start translating. In the status web page it is not specially 
>>clear how to download the set of files to your computer (you can do it 
>>one-by-one once you figure it out). A helpful answer to this question 
>>yesterday was a script... but many people who are starting localization 
>>do not know what to do with such a script.
>>
>>A simple compressed file with all the po files of the en_US or en_GB 
>>translation of 2.6 could save newcomers a lot of time (and people in the 
>>list a lot of explanations). I don't know how this would integrate later 
>>with the status pages, though.
>>    
>>
>>>end of "Re: gnome-i18n digest, Vol 1 #1523 - 5 msgs" from Javier SOLA <<
>>>      
>>>
>
>Javier -
>
>Once I was pointed to the proper instructions, I had no problem moving
>forwards. The bottom line is that having a tarball to download won't be
>beneficial to you in the end. If you can't use CVS and the gettext tools
>in the first place, you won't be able to update your translations once
>the initial versions are committed.
>
>Frankly, I found that everything that I needed was contained in:
>
>	http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/translator.html
>
>The only thing that you would need to do is find the proper CVSROOT as a
>non-committer, which isn't hidden that far ;;)
>
>Hopefully that document will help answer a lot of questions for you. I
>know that that was the one that did it for me.
>
># Adam
>
>
>--
>Adam Weinberger
>adamw@magnesium.net || adamw@FreeBSD.org
>adamw@vectors.cx    ||   adamw@gnome.org
>http://www.vectors.cx
>
>  
>