Re: Translations, GNOME and KDE

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 03:50, Christian Neumair wrote:
> On Di, 2004-01-06 at 14:58 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 11:21, Arafat Medini wrote:
> > 
> > > 2-Reduce the pos to only UI visable strings, no normal user will take a
> > > look at Debug strings and so speak with coders about which strings to
> > > include on the pos and which not...
> > 
> > For GTK+, we translate 
> > 
> >  A) User visible strings
> > 
> >  B) Error message details that might be displayed in a dialog box.
> >     ("File not found", etc.)
> > 
> >  C) Property description stirngs, as used in a GUI builder.
> > 
> > But we don't translate debug mesages that indicate a bug in the
> > program or a broken GTK+ installation.
> > 
> > What I'd really like to do separate out C) from the others so we
> > had two different domains and .po files for GTK+. That would make the
> > main GTK+ .po file much, much smaller and easier to translate.
> > 
> > This is not hard that hard (some Makefile gymnastics, mostly), but
> > we could really use a volunteer to do the work of separating the
> > strings into the two categories, since that is a lot of work.
> I know that this would work, and I know it would be straightforward, but
> I fear doing that:
> We'd need to separate the property descriptions file-wise (different
> domains, different POTFILES). Do you really like to have
> gtkwidgetproperty.c/.h containing gtk_widget_class_property_init which
> is called by gtk_widget_class_init? In addition, translators don't like
> multi-domain packages, they often get confused and don't look at po-
> whatever.

You'd just have a separate macro, P_() say that did:

 dgettext ("gtk2-properties", string)

and use that for properties, and use a separate invocation of xggettext
that only looks for P_()

 xgettext -k -k P_

or something like that should do it. Does that address your concern?

In terms of translator ease, well, would translators prefer having to
to learn about gtk2-properties or having to translate approximately
1000 extra strings to get a translated user interface for GNOME?

Regards,
							Owen