Re: Localisation Guide

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

tis 2004-01-06 klockan 11.13 skrev Stanislav Visnovsky:
> > > 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.
> 
> And that's why we should recomment specialized tools. You can get productive 
> faster and the editor can take care about a lot of technical details, such as
> updating header, checking accelerators etc.
> It's OK to describe using a simple editor, but IMHO specialized GUI 
> translation tools are much more important.

So do you actually believe that those who would be more efficient with a
specialized po editor would compensate for all those who couldn't
contribute if we set that as a requirement? It seems hard to believe,
especially as there are many teams that don't use special po editors at
all.
There is already documentation for po mode and whatnot. No need to
duplicate that. What we need is po file essentials; instructions for how
to contribute with a minimum of the requirements met and with the
simplest configuration possible. This is the important documentation we
didn't have, well until now that is.

Yes, we can recommend specialized po editors. But we cannot require
them, nor should our "getting started" instructions focus on them,
precisely because we don't require them, and because there already is
plenty with documentation for those.


Christian