Re: [Audacity-translation] New mailing list member

[Richard A. <ri...@au...>]

On Thu, 2010-03-11 at 16:28 +0100, Lasse C wrote:
> I just joined this mailing list and wanted to introduce myself. My
> name is Lasse, and I'm from Denmark. I have an MA in English, which is
> just about the only relevant qualification I have relative to the
> Audacity translation project; sadly, when it comes to SVNs and source
> code, I am pretty much clueless. I noticed, however, that the Danish
> translation of Audacity is very incomplete, and wanted to offer
> assistance regardless of my technical shortcomings.
> 
> So, while I imagine you have about a thousand "false starters" for
> every translator who actually follows through on their promises, I
> come to you on bended knee, asking for someone to give me a primer on
> the use of the SVN system on Google. I am very willing to begin the
> translation process, but I am not sure how to get started. Do I just
> translate the text in the "msgid" fields verbatim, and then put the
> Danish equivalents in the "msgstr" fields? This I could start on even
> without full access to the da.po file, which I could then just update
> later.

You shouldn't ever need the Audacity source code to work on translation
of Audacity, or have to interact with SVN other than through the web
interface.

Essentially there are 7 steps you need to go through, which you can
repeat as often as you like to improve the translation. You don't have
to do all the untranslated strings at once, we would be happy to have
any significant contributions to the translation state in SVN.

1) Download the current translation to start from. Go to
http://code.google.com/p/audacity/source/browse/audacity-src/trunk/locale
and locate the da.po file. Click on it, which will load a page showing
the contents of the file. On the right hand side there is a box marked
"File Info" which contains a link "View raw file". Right-click this and
select Save Link As / Save Target As. You should then be able to save
the da.po file to your computer.
2) Download the latest template file from the Audacity translation page:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/locale/audacity.pot
save this as audacity.pot.
3) Open the da.po in a translation program (there are numerous, I used
Virtaal when working through this). Go to File > Update to Template, and
select audacity.pot as the source file.
4) You will now have the up to date set of untranslated strings for
Audacity, along with the existing translations. You can now go through
and add translations for untranslated strings, or update existing
translations.
5) Use File > Save to save your changes to the da.po file.
6) Compile the da.po file into a audacity.mo file which you can copy
into your Audacity installation (replacing Languages/da/Audacity.mo) to
see how the new translation will look. I can't see a way to do this from
the Virtaal interface, I did it at the command line with
msgfmt da.po -o audacity.mo
7) Send the .po file (the one you edited) to this list, so we can commit
it to SVN for inclusion in future releases.

If you have any questions, please ask them here, and let us know what
operating system you are running and what translation package you are
using.

Richard