Re: major libgweather Locations updates

["Simos Xenitellis" <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 2:24 AM, Dan Winship <danw gnome org> wrote:
> I've just committed a huge update to libgweather's Locations.xml.in.
> From an i18n perspective, the big changes are that a lot of strings
> representing airport names, etc, went away and were replaced with actual
> city names. Also, many city names in some countries were replaced with
> better-localized/better-transliterated versions.
>
> This is unfortunately a huge amount of churn in an already-huge list of
> translatable strings. Two suggestions:
>
>    1) Search the po file comments for "This is the capital of", which
>       will let you find national capitals, which are presumably more
>       likely than average to need special translations. Also, search
>       for "is the traditional English name" to find cities that are
>       called something different in English than they are in the
>       local language, which usually also points to the need for a
>       translation.
>
>    2) Other than that, wait a week or so (or more) before translating
>       anything, and don't clean out the now-unused translations right
>       away, because we'll be requesting some help from gnome-love
>       which may result in some lame cities being removed and other ones
>       being renamed, etc. Also, once GNOME 2.23.6 is out there, we're
>       going to bump the intltool requirement to the latest version,
>       which will let us add msgctxts to disambiguate duplicate names
>       (eg the US state of Georgia vs the former Soviet Republic of
>       Georgia).

For Greece I have noticed the following,

a. The names in the original strings now have accents, such as
Alexandroúpolis, which helps non-native speakers. This is cool, but
also means that more messages require attention for subtle changes.
I think it's a move to the right direction.

b. There are multiple entries for airports, having them associated
with several nearby cities. For example, for LGKV, there are entries
for four cities, Chrysoúpolis, Dráma, Kavála, Xánthi.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%B2%CE%AC%CE%BB%CE%B1,+%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%BB%CE%AC%CE%B4%CE%B1&sll=34.741612,-95.625&sspn=68.827616,113.203125&ie=UTF8&ll=41.109365,24.535217&spn=0.512179,0.884399&t=p&z=10

How much is the radius you picked when considering nearby cities? Is
it more than 50Km?

c. In some cases, the transliterated version does not have an accent.
For example,

Chrysoúpolis Airport and
Chrysoupoli Airport

It looks as if the airport name of the original entry gets the
transliteration, while the nearby cities do not get transliteration of
the airport name.

Simos