Re: Localisation Guide

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

sön 2004-01-04 klockan 23.08 skrev Åsmund Skjæveland:
> > The long-promised guide that Telsa and I have been working on has found
> > its way into GNOME CVS. It still has quite a few FIXMEs and gaps.
> > Please take the time to send us your thoughts, or even patches. :)
> 
> Through most of the part about editing the PO file, you assume that
> the translator is editing the file as pure text. It'd be better to
> recommend, from the outset, to use a PO-editor or a PO-aware editor
> such as Emacs, Gtranslator, Kbabel or PoEdit.

I don't think I agree on this point. As a translation project, we want
as many and as complete translations as possible, and to be able to
reach that goal, we must be able to attract as many volunteers as
possible. Also, to some extent we can't assume every contributor will be
a technical person, since translation is mainly a linguistic thing, not
a technical one.
This usually means that we can't have too high requirements set. As I
see it, this is basically our lowest requirements for a contributing
translator:

1) Web access, or some other way to get the pot and po files from the
translation status pages.
2) Any UTF-8 capable text editor.
3) Some kind of access to a machine with msgfmt installed for checking
the validity of the po files with "msgfmt -cv".
4) Mail access or some other way to send the finished translations on to
someone that can verify/commit them.

I don't think we want to restrict 2) into some specific set of editors
capable of dealing with po files natively. That would mean that people
couldn't easily translate from Windows, for example. And even if we have
3) I don't think we should limit the scope further by requiring the
editing to be done on a un*xy machine as well.

Instructions should assume only the lowest requirements being met. That
doesn't mean they couldn't link to documentation for PO mode or other
such docs for specific PO editors, but that documentation should
probably not be duplicated in this one.


Christian