Re: economy in translations

[Mario Blättermann <mariobl gnome org>]

Am Sonntag, den 21.02.2010, 17:56 +0100 schrieb Nils-Christoph Fiedler: 
> hej folks,
> 
> i have a little question about economy in translating software.
> busy as a bee, we're translating every single line / string of software.
> but isn't there a possibility, technically, to just write a big library
> or a "super-giga-master.po"-file, which includes all of the strings,
> instead of translating equal strings in different software again and
> again? i mean even in one file some terms appear more than one time and
> e.g. the strings "File", "Edit" or "View" also occur in nearly every
> lib. i guess we could save a hundreds of hours of translating. 
> so this might be a stupid question from a translator to a developer, but
> isn't it possible, that strings in software refer to one big catalog,
> instead of one .po for every single application?
> 
> kind regards,
> nils

Hi Nils,

if you're using advanced translation tools like Poedit or Gtranslator,
you *have* such a big global database. For example in Poedit, open the
preferences dialog and click on the "translation memory" tab. Here you
can fill the translation database with the desired content. The steps
should be self-explaining.

After you have created the database (be patient, this may take a while),
you open a *.po file as usual. Right-click on an entry in the upper
pane, and you get some recommendations for the translation. Note, you
have to assign the language codes to the document, in your case "Low
German".
There's a second way to use the automatic translation. Click on "Catalog
→ Automatically translate using TM". But this can cause that a lot of
strings will be filled in with nonsense. In this case Poedit is as
stupid as a fly swat, the "fuzzy logic" doesn't work really perfect.
However, if it fills in the strings automatically, they will be marked
as fuzzy by default.

In my mind, to provide a global translation database within the
installed system, where applications can get their translations from, is
no good idea. It would be too difficult to distinguish between
translations for certain applications. For example, the translation for
"Knight" is in German not the same for both Chess and Card games. That's
why we should keep our application-wise translations.

Cheers,
Mario