Re: PHP+gettext

[Shawn T Amundson <amundson eventloop com>]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 10:44:32PM +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> 
> > We are both very opinionated, which means both of
> > our methods would probably work out in the end.
> 
> a) does not imply b) :-)
> Your argument was that gettext is bad (to which I obviously disagreed),
> you didn't mention anything about how your proposal would work with
> regards to translation or why it would be better.

The reason it's better is that the text/html is completely seperated
from the code.  When you write stuff that way, you don't need to have
translation tables.  (Actually, you still might have to have translation
for dynamic data, but in general it's not necessary.)

Text/html fragments are saved as templates.  Templates are combined to 
create a webpage.  The simplest example is a template which contains a
complete html page, say index.ftl.  On disk then, you have:

templates/en/index.ftl

And the translator creates:

templates/fr/index.ftl

If the translator hasn't het created the French version, it would fall
back and show the English version.  CVS can be used to determine what 
exactly has changed so that the translators can update their versions.

That's a very high level overview showing most of what a translator 
would need to know.  

> 
> 
> > Would you be interesting in helping translate www.gtk.org into Swedish?
> 
> Sure, if you use gettext :-)

No, that's not likely.  

> Then I can, among others:
> 	* Translate partly automatically using existing Swedish translations I
> 	have in a po format translation memory (~4MB existing po format
> 	translations)
>
> 	* Maintain and simply update the translations (the wonders of msgmerge)
> 
> 	* Easily detect new or changed strings and update those, and know where
> 	in the pages they come from
> 
> I don't know if you noticed that SourceForge started an i18n project a
> year ago. Well, SF i18n is dead now (only very few strings are possible
> to translate, and nothing happens, even though there are a lot of
> willing translators). The reason? Choosing a home-invented and by all
> means stupid (from i18n view) translation mechanism.

Well, I'm very interested in learning how to make Fabric easier to use for
translators, so I'm listening.  

-Shawn

--
Shawn T. Amundson                       amundson eventloop com	
Research and Development                http://www.eventloop.com/
EventLoop, Inc.                         (651) 999-0130

"The assumption that the universe looks the same in every
 direction is clearly not true in reality." - Stephen Hawking