[Adonthell-devel] i18n progress

[Kai Sterker]

After some troubles I faced yesterday, I finally produced my first
translated 'dialogue' today. It's not ready for committing yet, but I
might manage later today.

Still a few words about the whole matter:

Back then I have said that the translation of the dialogues happens on
C++ side, so that we only have to make calls to gettext when a string is
actually displayed. That means, we need to add gettext and friends to
the engine. I've done that yesterday. However, the message catalogue
comes with the data, not the engine. That means first of all the we must
determine the catalogue to use at runtime (no problem), but it also
means we'll have to add gettext support to the data. At least there
needs to be po/ directory with the different catalogue sources. Not that
this would be a problem, it's just something that didn't occur to me
earlier.

The next problem I faced was how to test whether stuff works. The new
dialogue engine isn't ready yet, and even if it was, there's no gui to
display something. So I decided to add a "preview" mode to dlgedit. The
problem with the translation is that the translator gets a list of
strings that are out of context. So after each string is translated,
they might no longer fit together in the dialogue. That's where the
preview mode comes in. Dlgedit now has the option to load a catalogue at
runtime and then displays all text using the translation provided in the
catalogue. That way, inconsistencies can be easily spotted and corrected
in the .po file. Of course, while in preview mode, no changes can be
made to the dialogue itself, which is still in English after all.

As I said, I have the preview mode basically working. It just needs some
code cleanup and proper error handling. The next step would be to finish
the dialogue compiler and engine, and perhaps write a little console app
for demonstration.

Kai