Re: Gnome Internationalization: A proposal

[Edward Mbugua Kamau <emkamau afrocenter com>]

I'm glad a bunch of people have picked up on this. It really looks like
it will get done. 

Whe I proposed having a database of .po strings , thats all I was
thinking of, but it seems so much more can be done. Anyway here is the
basic set up as I see it.

My main problem was getting the .po strings into a database`. It seems
Filipe is dealing with that. That will be really great.As I see it, the
databse should at least have:

1. the package name (.po file the string comes from)
2. the location of the string in the .po file. This could be given by
the '#: dedit.desktop.in.h:1' line in the .po file
2. the msgid

 for example the .po file name (this is for dedit)  and following info:

#: dedit.desktop.in.h:1
msgid "DEdit"
msgstr ""

In addition the database should accept and store the msgid translations
made over the web UI`. This could just be a separate table with all the
translated strings in it.

There should also be a field for marking the translations as accepted by
the language maintainer. 

It would also be nice if the databse is structured in such a way that
the accepted msgstr and their msgid and location can be extracted from
thedatabase and the .po file created automatically from that info.

As a basic starting point all the processing of translations will be
done off line by the language maintainer. All the database and web UI
will help in is gathering translations from language speakers at large.
The language maintainer will then go over those translations and pick
the best for inclusion in the actual .po files.

In short what we need first is a basic system which can then evolve to
include all the other necessary stuff.

Edward Kamau


On Fri, 2002-03-22 at 05:43, Filipe Maia wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Did you consider how the database will be used? The most important part is
> > offline translation. This means you need to handle most of the problems
> > any CVS-like system have. Most important, you will need a specialized
> > client (at least web UI) to handle these issues.
> 
> At the moment i'm only a doing a program that can take a bunch of .po files and dump them to a database. It could be runned from the server where the GNOME CVS tree is at regular time intervals.
> 
> > 
> > I don't believe you can use such a system for storing translation for each
> > message online.
> > 
> > My key point is that this will be kind of hard work to get it done right.
> 
> Yup, you're right. That's why i'm just doing the basics right now.
> 
> > (anyway, I will be happy to implement a KBabel dictionary module to
> > support this).
> > 
> > Stanislav
> > 
> 
> --
> 
> *----------------------------------------------------------------*
> |  .''`.  | Filipe Maia                                          |
> | : :'  : | email: fmaia@gmx.net                                 |
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