Re: en_GB translations (was Re: GNOME 2.2 Translation Statisticsand Rankings)

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Fri, 2003-01-31 at 10:01, Christian Rose wrote:
> fre 2003-01-31 klockan 02.02 skrev iain:
> > 
> > > 54	en_GB	1.48	Unsupported		52		-2
> > 
> > I'm just wondering about how en_GB is calculated in this list as the
> > majority of strings don't need translated.
> 
> Currently, the stats for en_GB are counted the same way as for every
> other translation, for various practical reasons. The tools count
> non-fuzzy, non-empty msgstrs as translated and it would be difficult to
> do special manual exceptions to this, if not even impossible since
> there's no way to automatically distinguish between non-translated,
> non-verified stuff and "no-need-for-translation" stuff that was left
> empty.
> 
> As for every other translation, messages that haven't been given
> attention either have an empty msgstr or are marked fuzzy. Translated
> messages that have been translated or checked are non-empty and
> non-fuzzy. Messages that don't need a translation into the other
> language usually only have the contents of the msgid copied into the
> msgstr unchanged by the translator, so that there is an indication that
> these messages have been taken care of and checked (even if the
> "translation" didn't envolve any actual translation in these cases) and
> will be counted as translated.
> 
> The only special thing about en_GB in this is that instead of a minority
> of the messages it's the majority of messages that don't need any actual
> translation, and that thus the majority of msgstrs only need to get
> filled with the unchanged value of the msgids. Newer gettext versions
> even have a special tool to help en translators with this:
> 
>     $ msgen --help
>     Usage: msgen [OPTION] INPUTFILE
>     
>     Creates an English translation catalog.  The input file is the last
>     created English PO file, or a PO Template file (generally created by
>     xgettext).  Untranslated entries are assigned a translation that is
>     identical to the msgid, and are marked fuzzy.
> 
> This way, the en_GB translator doesn't need to manually copy the
> contents of the individual msgids into the msgstrs all the time when he
> or she translates or verifies the translation of messages; only
> un-fuzzying the messages is required to indicate they have been
> verified. And when the msgstrs are un-fuzzied and non-empty it's clear
> that they have been verified by an en_GB translator. Unfortunately,
> currenly that just isn't the case for 98.52% of the en_GB messages.

I fixed the en_GB translation script in gnome-i18n to do that. It just
copies the msgid when it doesn't need translating.

Cheers

-- 
/Bastien Nocera
http://hadess.net

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Segmentation fault