[Web-erp-developers] Italian Translation

[ing. L. Tur <luc...@pd...>]

Hello Phil,
sorry for my silence, but I had some troubles that kept me away from work.
I've seen that you started to work on the gettext solution.

I've spent some time last week to study the approach of gettext, and my 
opinion is that we the gettext solution is efficient but has the problem that 
the translations can be done without any control, i.e. you simply change a 
text file.

Given thsi I have started thinking how I could get the best from the gettext 
approach and still keeping the db repository for the languages.
I made some experiment and sorted out the following.

In my "language.php" file I've defined a function translate(), which receives 
a parameter which can be a string or an identifier. The function uses the 
$lang array, which contains all the translations needed, and which is loaded 
at the beginning.

function translate($idOfLabelToBeTranslated)
{
   global $lang;
   if ($lang[$idOfLabelToBeTranslated]!=null)
     return $lang[$idOfLabelToBeTranslated];
   else
     return $idOfLabelToBeTranslated;
}

As you can see translate simply returns the translated message, which has then 
to be echoed (so it is very similar to gettext_noop...)

I also enlarged the db column containing the label identifier: now it's 100 
chars and can be enlarged again.
Since $idOfLabelToBeTranslated can be a string you can maintain code 
readability, as you can see in the following chunk of code from 
SelectCustomer.php

....
if ($_POST['Search']==translate("Search Now")){

	If ($_POST['Keywords'] AND $_POST['CustCode']) {
		$msg= translate("Customer name keywords have been used in 
preference to the customer code extract entered.");
		$_POST["Keywords"] = strtoupper($_POST["Keywords"]);
	}
	If ($_POST['Keywords']=="" AND $_POST['CustCode']=="") {
		$msg=translate("At least one customer name keyword OR an 
extract of a customer code must be entered for the search");
.....

As you can understand, using this approach I am addressing your main concern, 
which is maintaining the code easy to read.

But also I am addressing my 2 concerns: having the application working at any 
time, even during translation, and having a simple way to translate without 
the danger of destroying the application. These issues are very important to 
me; since I believe that a translator have to be free to see exactly where a 
certain sentence appears, in order to deeply understand the meaning and give a 
proper translation. A translation with the gettext approach is done without 
simultaneously looking at the application. Using my approach you can have one 
browser on the application and the other one in the application created for 
translation (i.e. some php pages that show the original and let you write the 
translation in a form)

Now I am trying to solve the problem of parameters within a sentence, and in 
particular the fact that the position of parameters can change from one 
language to another (see the english-german example in the gettext 
documentation)..

Finally: Phil, if you don't like this approach, i am going to bend down and 
conform to you decision. The use of "translate" function is exactly as 
gettext_noop, so it'll be easy to adapt. But please first try to consider the 
db solution.
Luca