Re: GNOME 2.24: Worst release cycle I have been a part of [l10n/i18n]

[F Wolff <friedel translate org za>]

On So, 2008-10-12 at 14:08 +0200, Kenneth Nielsen wrote:
> Hello my fellow GNOME enthusiasts
> 
> Ok so knowing that there is a tendency towards "Too Long Didn't Read",
> if you think this looks to long, just skip to "A set of interesting
> stats".

....

Hallo Kenneth

I think your message was written in very good spirit, but of course, I'm
a translator :-)  The message of "it was harder than usual, let's be
aware of that" is a useful one, I think.

I'll try to be brief. I'm from a "small" team. Most of the issues affect
us in similar ways, sometimes a bit worse. There are several other
issues, like the increasing size of GNOME. We need to reconsider things
from time to time, although I have to agree with Claude: things mostly
work quite well (especially compared to other projects where I have been
involved).


About strings not marked for translation: Let's give developers a tool
to address the problem with. The Translate Toolkit contains podebug:
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/podebug

This allows the developer to change a PO file in a few ways, to test for
coverage of the strings for translation:

podebug normal.po new.po --rewrite=xxx --format=""

msgid "File"
msgstr "xxxFilexxx"

Any strings without xxx...xxx are not marked for translation.

podebug normal.po new.po --rewrite=unicode --format=""

msgid "complex"
msgstr "ƈǿḿƥŀḗẋ"

(you might not see all the characters if you don't have fonts for the
characters)

This allows the developer to test for non-ASCII translations to see that
it doesn't break anything (I don't think this is a common problem in
GNOME, but I could be wrong).

For some reason I see it doesn't take .pot files as input, but a simple
rename to .po will solve it. It will unfortunately also "translate" the
variables. Perhaps this is something we can improve for a next release.


I believe this is something useful. Shall we start to suggest this to
developers? Perhaps we can at least remove one type of problem that
Kenneth mentioned (strings not marked for translation).

Friedel

--
Recently on my blog:
http://translate.org.za/blogs/friedel/en/content/autocompletion-during-translation