Re: Translations, GNOME and KDE

[Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>]

On Mi, 2004-01-07 at 18:12 +0100, Christian Neumair wrote:
> 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.

btw: Where should I put the P_ macro? Is it worth adding this to glib or
should we have a new file called gtkobjectprivate.h?

regs,
 Chris

> > 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 :)