Re: [Jaws-project-developers] Translations for Jaws-MVC

[Pablo F. <pa...@pa...>]

Hello!,

El s=E1b, 20-11-2004 a las 17:47 +0000, Jon Wood escribi=F3:
> However, we're still left with the question of translations. It appears
> that we have a few options on how to do this - whichever one gets chosen
> in the end I'm willing to step up and actually implement it, since
> translation is huge draw for users.

Yes, we have been talking about this issue.=20

My suggestion is to use GetText for translation, there are i18n groups
that will be happy helping us translating jaws to other foreign
languages. For example: any Gnome app, or almost any GTK app have their
i18n groups.

> 1. The current way
> In Jaws 0.4 translations are simply a bunch of constant definitions - I
> haven't had a good look around the code for how this works, but
> presumably there is some sort of system in place to prevent existing
> constants getting overwritten.
>=20
> Pros: Easy for translators to use.
> Cons: Kinda messy, none standard, no tools available for editing.

Yeah, is easy for translators but I think we can make it better.
Dunno... I hate long files with lot of constants. I don't like it to
much.

> 2. GetText
> GetText is the standard method for providing i18n
> (internationalisation... you can see why I'm not gonna repeat that :P)
> in open source projects - it's used by Horde, KDE, Gnome, and a billion
> and one other projects.

;-)

> There is built in support of GetText in PHP, although it doesn't come
> built as standard in the binary releases. Realistically though, it
> shouldn't be too hard to install, and we can have some sort of fallback
> to use if GetText isn't available (probably just returning the string
> sent for translation).

As I said, I preffer GetText, however there are some points we need to
take care:

* Test the files po files. Maybe this is not a problem, but my luck is
not good in these cases. I know people that just 'translate' to get a
name in the THANKS file. Sometimes the languages are bad translated
(this doesn't happens if the translation is made by a native speaker) or
people don't take the time to read how a .po file works. So, we should
decide where to look: i18n groups or native speakers?. 90% and 10%?.

* PHP Support. As you said, we should take care in cases where the
sysadmin is a paranoic guy that doesn't wants to install it cause he
thinks his server is under attack.. bah, believe me, people like these
ones REALLY exists. Or well, the other case is for windows users,
Windows PHP binary files include gettext support?. So, we should have an
alternate system, or like you said, try to return the original text (in
english).

* Locales: We need to take care of this issue?. I doubt if you can use
italian support (for example) in a server that just have english enabled
as the unique locale.

I have no problems using GetText, but I hate users (not developers) that
want everything in a system: If they can't use GetText, they will scream
and blame you or in the best cases they will report stupid bugs..  So,
we should discuss it and find a nice way to teach them :-).

> I'd also like to propose creating a jaws-i18n list to help co-ordinate
> translators without them having to dealing with the dev list and
> everything that carries. Any new strings should be announced to
> jaws-i18n to make sure that the translators know that they're around so
> that they don't have to track CVS commits.

Ok, ion is the Master and I think he will create the list :-).


Regards,
Pablo
--=20
Pablo Fischer Sandoval (pablo [arroba/at] pablo.com.mx)
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