Re: Translations, GNOME and KDE

[Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>]

On Mi, 2004-01-07 at 10:39 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 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?

Yes, thanks. I'll try to implement something like that.


> 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?

Neither the latter nor the matter :)

regs,
 Chris