Am Freitag, den 19.08.2005, 17:23 +0930 schrieb Clytie Siddall:
> I've just come up for air after some long sessions in HEAD PO files,
> and reported a _stack_ of typos etc. at Bugzilla,
Excellent!
> and that's given rise to some irritation, um, constructive
> suggestions in my mind. ;)
Event better!
> 1. Is the title of the PO file actually the name of the program as
> listed in the Bugzilla "pick a Gnome program" list? For example, I
> can't find a listing for "uf-view" or "contact-lookup-applet".
These are not yet covered by bugzilla. For now, you should send your
suggestions to Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> for uf-view and to
Ross Burton <ross burtonini com> for contact-lookup-applet. Hopefully in
the long term bugzilla components will be added for those products.
Maybe you could ask them nicely, too? :)
> 2. If we are going to continue using Bugzilla for problems with PO
> files, could we please ask each developer to choose the component
> "general" for his or her program? When reporting typos or problems
> with the PO file, being given the choice between "applet" and "dÃmon"
> is not useful.
We should IMHO rather add a "localization" component to gettextized
bugzilla products.
> 3. In fact, could we have a component named "PO file" or
> "translation", thus alerting the developer from the beginning to what
> kind of report it is? Bugzilla is largely if not completely set up
> for reports of difficulties _running_ a program, not with translating
> its PO file. Having our own category would help both us and the
> developers. It would help especially for Gnome Bug-Squashing Parties,
> and Gnome Love Days, where translators could concentrate on bugs
> reported under our category, if we wished, and achieve (even ;) )
> more. Perhaps the i18n and l10n tags do this already, but I still
> think it would help.
The product is called l10n [1]. Pretty cryptic, I must admit.
> 5. I reported the typo "occured" against four separate programs' PO
> files today, and that's only _today's_ bug-reporting. This typo is a
> disease at Gnome. Do we have any hope of immunizing our PO-file
> developers? I thought it was a recent or isolated problem, when I
> first encountered this typo in a few files, but it just keeps on
> happening, and I've noticed at least one other translator saying he
> has been trying to change this for some time. Is there, in fact, a
> more efficient way to address a wide-spread type of error, other than
> reporting it individually, again and again, against each and every PO
> file which contains it?
You can bring up the issue on the desktop-devel-list mailing list [2] as
well, thus trying to attract developers' attention. Don't forget to
include listings of all affected software and links to your bug reports.
> 6. I would really like to make some sort of effective effort towards
> increasing developers' awareness of the need for context. For
> example, this string:
>
> msgstr "by {0}"
>
> No comment, no context, no nearby strings that appear to have any
> connection with it at all. Good grief!
>
> I reported this as a query, but I think we have to do far too much
> guesswork while translating. How can we improve the situation? Is
> there anything constructive and positive we can do?
I always had the advantage of being interested in source code and
application context. The first thing I did with a software I localized
is building it and grepping through the source code to find out what the
string is all about and in what context it appears. The string you talk
about is obviously from a C# software. They have this cracky {i}
construct instead of good-old (error prone ;P) C-style format
specifiers. It denotes that something will be inserted instead of the
{1}, probably an author's name or something. You can always rant at
programmers for not being i18n friendly, since almost all of them don't
spend a lot of attention to l10n details.
> 8. On the subject of repetitive work, I don't know much, if anything,
> about the way Gnome system resources work, but do we really have to
> translate things like "Orientation", "Orientation of the Tray",
> "File", "Edit", "Print" and other extremely common if not ubiquitous
> strings again and again in PO files?
IMHO we should really have shared GTK+ stock items for those extremely
common ones. The basic UI element descriptions should be constructed
inside the GTK+ library.
I'll bring this up on the GTK+ development list. Note that this will be
available downstream with GNOME 2.16 at earliest.
[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=l10n
[2] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
--
Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part