Re: Information to translators and question

["Abel Cheung" <abelcheung gmail com>]

On 9/8/06, Andreas Røsdal <andrearo pvv ntnu no> wrote:
> I would like some help with properly i18n'ing an optional, external
> library used in gnome-games, and would also like to involve the
> translators.

To those who don't know, it means adding real game server
support, and people from different countries can play together
once they have account on that server. Not just able to play
with people within the same LAN (zeroconf based).

My answer at the bottom....


> The library ggz-gtk is used by gnome-games in the CVS HEAD branch now.
> However, it is not translated to more than a few languages, which could
> become a problem when it is used in GNOME. I therefore got suggestions to
> include the .pot file in gnome-games, to allow GNOME translators to
> translate it. The .pot files contains about two hundered strings, so the
> worm involved is not that large. The new translations will be merged back
> to ggz-gtk eventually.
>
> I have threrefore added a note to translators about this in
> po/README.TRANSLATORS, added po/ggz-gtk.pot which contains the strings to
> be translated, and started modifying po/Makefile.in.in.own to concatenate
> ggz-gtk.pot with the other strings in gnome-games.
>
> What I would like is first some help reviewing po/Makefile.in.in.own
> It concatenates the two pot files here:
> msgcat -s $(GETTEXT_PACKAGE).pot $(EXTRA_POT) -o $(GETTEXT_PACKAGE).pot
> However, I have noticed that it doe snot always work, since new
> translations committed to gnome-games do not contain the new strings from
> GGZ. I suppose the msgcat statement should be used other places in the
> makefiles as well. Any suggestions?
>
> Also, I hope that most translators now have been informed about the akward
> solution, and have understanding for the fact that I am only trying to
> make the i18n better, evern though the actual implementation is not very
> pretty.   :)

IMHO this is only an internim solution, not a permanent one, as
you would spend a lot of time syncing translation from ggz library
back and forth.

Besides, many gnome translators get the pot/po file from
l10n-status.gnome.org, which (AFAIK) simply invoke intltool-update
to generate the pot/po files, thus your maneuver of pot file
would be all gone.

AFAIK they have always been managing translation on their own
in the past, so in short term asking GNOME translators to help
translating is indeed a quick way to get it localized; however
I guess GGZ people may also need a long term managing of
the translations, otherwise latecomers may not be able to
see their translation show up inside ggz library.

One more thing, is including the translation inside gnome-games
enough to have localized ggz library? Should ggz library be
modified in order to fetch translation from gnome-games
text domain, or I'm wrong?

Abel


>   - Andreas
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-i18n mailing list
> gnome-i18n gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n


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Abel Cheung   (GPG Key: 0xC67186FF)
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