Re: [Plone-i18n] Leveraging Translation Techniques in Plone

[Andreas P. <an...@tr...>]

Hanno Schlichting wrote:
> poEdit has some limited support for translation memories. The practical
> approach taken by the Welsh language team has been to convert our files
> into fully gettext compatible onces, translate them and convert them
> back. They have written a simple script to automate it and this is
> provided with the PloneTranslations package in the i18n/utils directory.
> The script is called fillmsgstr.py and has some good documentation in it.

Interesting, I'll have a look at that script.


> We already have an automated test suite that takes care of checking
> syntactic correctness, variables still being present and proper
> quotation. XML/HTML should not be contained in our files at all, so we
> don't need those checks. All the other checks are highly language
> dependent and unless there are some tools out there which we could
> leverage I don't think it's worth spending time on those.

Yes, I was also thinking along the lines of leveraging external tools.
Partly because I was not aware of the test suite and partly because I 
would like to see how useful the translate-toolkit checks are when run 
on Plone :-).

On an interesting side-note, we have recently implemented some 
infrastructure in the translate-toolkit for language-specific features.
This allows a language to eg. specify its valid characters and what 
character it uses for the end of a sentence, between words etc.
This can be used to write some language-specific checks.
But we have not actually started writing such checks :-)

> The msgctext support has landed in gettext version 0.15 which was
> released in July 2006. While I think we should switch to that approach
> in the mid-term, we do need support for it on the various levels of the
> stack we are depending on. The same goes for the long needed
> plural-forms support.
> 
> Both of these are not supported by the gettext module included in
> Python. In return both of them are also not supported on the Zope (3)
> level, which our translation machinery is based on.

I am not 100% familiar with the complete cycle that happens in Plone i18n.
Are you talking about the end of the cycle, when Plone needs to read the 
translated po-files?
Are both the Python gettext module and the Zope 3 infrastructure used 
independantly, or is Plone using Zope 3/Five, which in turn uses the 
gettext module?

> 
> As long as we don't have support on the lower levels of our stack for
> these two concepts, we simply cannot use them. Every help on
> implementing these two features on the lower levels is much appreciated ;)

Yes, this is somewhat of a bummer.
I could help by finding the bug trackers for these projects and 
submitting some bug reports.

Regards,
Andreas

-- 
http://translate.org.za/