Re: [Texmacs-dev] Translations

[David Allouche]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 07:29:54PM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> 
> > to Finnish, but soon found that the number of strings is huge and a direct
> > translation of some of the words listed would probably result in some very
> > funny menu entries.
> 
> Yes, but it *is* quite important to have a real translation of the interface.
> Not everybody, even in Finland, understands English. When supporting
> a new language, we therefore made up the criterion that we want
> a translation of the user interface.
> 
> Nevertheless, you are not obliged to do all the work on your own.
> If you have translated only a part, then we can put this in the main
> distribution and wait for someone else to do the rest. You may also ask
> some collegues for help. As soon as we have something reasonably complete,
> then we will take care of the rest; if you can not think of good
> translations for a few terms, then that is not a big problem,
> since we can postpone such translations to later.

I concur with the initial poster (btw, could you use the standard "on
xxxx, yyy wrote" header when replying?)

The translation dictionnaries are WAY too big, and there is NO
separation whatsoever between GUI translations, style translatian and
since 1.0.0.20 help section titles translations (actually help menu
entries).

That can cause some confusion when trying to make translations because
one need to know the context, and that makes it very difficult to make
partial translations (just the styles, just the doc, just the GUI).
One may may argue that no translation is better than a partial
translation. But in any case an "orderly" partial translation (only
style, or only GUI) is surely better than a messy partial translation
(the 200 first items in the dictionnary).

Moreover, there is no way to dismiss dictionnary entries which are no
longer needed because the corresponding GUI items have been renamed.

But the really important point here (there have been some discussion
on #texmacs) is that the "File" menu and the "File" label in the
get-file dialog must not be translated to the same word in Swedish.

Also, the current translation scheme hardwires the syntactic structure
of phrases and mix thi sin the code. That is very bad. Actually, the
syntactic structure must be provided by the translation, and the code
should only provide the variable part of the message using snprintf(3).

I do not intend to make the usual rant "we should use gettext in order
to leverage numerous existing translation support tools, exploit the
.po corpus of free desktop project and not reinvent the wheel one more
time"... well... I just did.

-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
   address@hidden  |    address@hidden
TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.


 LocalWords:  GUI translatian dictionnary texmacs thi snprintf gettext Allouche