Re: [Audacity-devel] Volunteers.txt

[Matt B. <mbr...@cs...>]

On Apr 4, Dominic Mazzoni wrote:

> Matt, I've been assuming that you are contacting anyone who volunteers to
> translate off-list.  Please let us know if that is indeed the case.

I've touched base with each translation volunteer, but not had any real
discussion.  My plan has been to contact all of them once I have the code and
instructions ready for localization, but (as I'm sure you've noticed) my plans
to do that have been continually delayed.  I really do think it will finally
get done this weekend, but I'm aware it's not the first time I've said that.

> Also I'd appreciate an update on how i18n is going in general, and what we
> can all do to help.

I am about ready to post a brief guide for translators.  When this is done I
will post it along with the current .po file (message catalog), which the
volunteers can then begin translating.

I also have a small patch to create add a Language pref to the Interface
preference panel.  At the moment, this requires the user to type in the two-
character language code (en, fr, de).  This isn't an elegant interface, but it
will be sufficient for testing.  I'd like to produce private test builds of
the unstable CVS version with this patch, so that the translators can test
their translations.

Remaining issues besides producing translations:

* How hard would it be to backport translation to the 1.0 branch, and is it
  worthwhile to do this?  At the moment, I think that this would be a very
  large amount of work and not worth the effort.  Also, I'm hoping to use the
  wxWindows 2.3 API, which might be possible for Audacity 1.2 but not for 1.0.

* How will users install and choose translated message catalogs?
  Unfortunately, the wxWindows locale system makes it hard to produce a good
  user interface for this.  This has been improving in the 2.3 series, so we
  may eventually have a better solution.  For now I'm looking at the possible
  approaches using the current API.

> One easy way to do this is to use our Sourceforge shell accounts; someone
> could create the file in their SF home directory and make it readable and
> writable by anyone in the group "audacity", and not by anyone else.

This sounds good.  We can also put it in the audacity group home directory.
By the way, I'd like to use RCS for the audacity web pages.  I can set this up
if you think it's a good idea.

> Additionally, should we create a mailing list for i18n?

Yes, this would be very good.