Re: intermediate language in translation tools

[Dwayne Bailey <dwayne translate org za>]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 20:51 +0100, Danilo Åegan wrote:
> Hi Santiago,
> 
> Today at 18:19, Santiago Ruano RincÃn wrote:
> 
> > The translation from english to another well-known language like French,
> > German o Spanish is possible, but not to one like "PÃez", where the
> > people who speak another language doesn't speak English but Spanish.
> >
> > The tools that I know display the "source messages" in english
> > (obvious), but I need one that shows a "intermediate language" (taking
> > another .po), so, a person could translate the messages from Spanish to
> > PÃez. is there a tool with a feature like that?, If not, I could help to
> > modify one.
> 
> I'd actually suggest another approach: write a simple two-way
> transforming program which will do the following.  You provide it
> with eg. reference.po (es.po) and your translation.po, and it outputs 
> a new file with msgid's being msgstr's from es.po, and msgstr's being
> from your translation.po.

Good idea.  We can currently already do that with the Translate Toolkit
(http://translate.sf.net) for Mozilla XPIs.  So you get French msgid and
your language for the msgstr.  But not at the moment with raw PO files.

The tools are written in Python.  We have come across a few teams now
who do not have access to good English skills but are proficient ln
languages such as French, Portuguese, Spanish, etc


> This will allow all translators to use any PO tools they wish, and
> you'd only have to convert this back (you may come across some
> problems, like duplicated msgid's, but that's easily resolved with
> either msguniq, or manually).

I would actually suggest placing the English in the PO message comments
(so that creating the final PO is simpler), then place the new source
language in the PO msgid.

-- 
Dwayne Bailey <dwayne translate org za>
Translate.org.za
+27-12-343-0389