Re: [Audacity-translation] Buanzo away until 9th November

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

On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 01:28 +0000, ga...@au... wrote:
> So (as much as to clarify for myself and maybe others, and I certainly 
> stand to be corrected)...
> 
> What we're really saying is that for a new translator who has not 
> done this (much) before, the best thing they can do is take the   
> Audacity or web site .po file (*not* .pot) and translate the 
> untranslated strings and review the "fuzzy" strings. Only if the 
> .po file is unmaintained/untranslated would it make sense to 
> work directly from the .pot.
> 
> But the common mistake people make is to get the .pot file and 
> translate that. Although it might well have a few very recently 
> added strings not in the .po file, this then means that translations
> people have done in the .po file since it was last updated from the 
> .pot are all lost. 
> 
> Probably on http://audacity.sourceforge.net/community/translation
> we should be clearer "start a new translation" means  "start translating
> into a language for which there is not yet any translation". 
> 
> But for experienced translators with the right tools, they would get 
> the .pot file, merge the new English strings from that into the 
> existing .po file, and then translate the .po, which is the ideal.

I think the "getting started" instructions could do worse than just tell
people to get the current po file and add to / review fuzzy the strings
in it. We could then link off to starting a new language (which really
ought to make the language code etc stuff rather clearer) and to
updating with new strings.

We need to come to some sort of agreement on updating .po files with new
strings from the .pot file. The practicality is that an automated update
is done before compiling .mo files for either release or use on the
website, but historically we haven't committed those updates to CVS.

Would it on balance be easier to get peripheral (or just busy)
translators involved with the project if the .po files in CVS were
updated with new strings by one of the project administrators? This
would be relatively trivial to administer, and would mean that .po files
downloaded from CVS would always be reasonably close to the .pot files
(although we would always make those available as well).

Richard

P.S. I've pushed new .pot files and newly compiled .mo files to the web
server just now.