Gnome 2.0 Localization for Solaris

[Damien Donlon <Damien Donlon Sun COM>]

Hi All,
Myself and a few others are working out the details of 
the localization plan for Gnome 2.0 on Solaris. Currently
the plan is to do translation for all software to be included 
in the Gnome 2.0 Solaris release which has not already been 
completed by other members of the community. We will also 
be doing translation for the documentation and help content 
being provided by Sun. So far, the language list is as follows :

de          German
es          Spanish
it          Italian
fr          French
pt_BR       Portugese Brazilian
ja          Japanese
zh_CN       Simplified Chinese
zh_TW       Traditional Chinese
ko          Korean
pl          Polish
sv          Swedish

We are investigating the possibility of doing some additional 
languages but these haven't been confirmed yet. All translations will 
eventually go back into the community CVS tree. 

We have a number  of issues which I'd be _very_ grateful to get input 
& feedback on. They are :

- Given the large amount of translation involved, how do you think
  we ought to break this up? If we take everything at once and the
  rest of the community continues doing translations are we
  going to come unstuck when we attempt to merge our translations back?
  I know we ought not but want to avoid as much as possible 
  duplication of work between our translation teams and other members
  of the community.
  
  We are thinking about taking it in chunks e.g 6/7 CVS modules at
  a time thereby reducing the incidence of this happening by having
  a quicker translation turnaround. What do you think of this approach 
  as opposed to just taking the lot at once? Would community CVS tagging 
  before our translation be useful?
  
- Are all modules now configured correctly to use xml-i18n-tools?
  Can we rely on "xml-i18n-update --pot" as capturing all localizable 
  content within software, .desktop AND .xml files in the community CVS 
  tree or have some CVS modules yet to be configured to use this mechanism?
  If so, which modules are not yet configured? 
  
  
- I have seen messages like the following when I attempt to run 
  "xml-i18n-update -pot" for certain modules :
  
  basil% /usr/local/bin/xml-i18n-update --pot
  Option type requires an argument
  Try `xml-i18n-extract --help' for more information.
  
  This appears to mean that I need to tell xml-i18n-extract which
  xml tags flag the translatable content. How do I make xml-i18n-extract 
  'know' which tags contain translatable content before I run 
  xml-i18n-update  i.e how do I avoid this error if I am automatically
  iterating through all modules generating the .pot files just using 
  'xml-i18n-update --pot' to generate the English .pot files?
  
- So far we are aware of the need to add translations to .po, .desktop and 
 .xml files. Is there translatable content in other files? Someone mentioned
  .server files as containing translatable content. What are they? 
  Are there others?
  
- Some .po files are not yet UTF-8 encoded. If we were to develop 
  a mechanism for checking and converting message files to UTF-8 are we 
  free to do so or would this have 'unforeseen' detrimental side-effects? 
  
We'd be grateful for your feedback on these issues or any tips/caveats 
or warnings about potential translation pitfalls which will help ensure that 
our translation work goes smoothly.

Big apologies for the 'epic' length of this email! 
Looking forward to your replies.

Damien



¤ºÿ°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤ºÿ°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤øø¤º°`°ºÿ¤
Damien Donlon
damien.donlon@sun.com
00 353 1 8199225
x19225