Re: [bug-gettext] Dear GetText People. How to translate from second language?

[Daiki Ueno]

Paweł Ozimiński <address@hidden> writes:

> I've got application in language A.
> I did the translation from lang A to lang B.
> Now I really need to translate application to lang C, but the
> translating person needs to get lang B as primary language because the
> person doesn't know lang A.

It has been on our todo list[1] for a long time.  Quoting:

|- Translating via an intermediate language (see thread 2006-09-28):
|  > For my language alone, there are many possible translators who would  
|  > work much better from Chinese or Russian to Vietnamese than from  
|  > English. It's simply a matter of which languages you have had the  
|  > opportunity to learn.
|
|  Now _that_ is an interesting idea!
|
|  Gettext can already nearly do this, too, if you write three small scripts/
|  programs to
|    - convert an English-based .pot file into a Russian-based .pot file,
|    - convert an English->Vietnamese PO file to a Russian->Vietnamese PO file,
|      (to be used when such a translator starts her work),
|    - convert an Russian->Vietnamese PO file back to an English->Vietnamese PO 
file
|      (to be used when a translator is done with her work).
|  And then the translator has these additional conversions steps all the time.

Unfortunately, it is still not possible with gettext-tools, but
externals tools like Translate Toolkit might have support for it[2].

|  It would be better, for the future, that the translator has only one
|  additional step to perform: When she gets a new PO file, she converts it
|  to a mixed English/Russian->Vietnamese PO file. Such a mixed
|  English/Russian->Vietnamese PO file would
|    1) permit the translator to peek into the English original when something 
is
|       unclear,
|    2) also work when not some of the Russian translations are missing or 
fuzzy,
|    3) get rid of the "convert back" step, since msgfmt could directly grok
|       the mixed English/Russian->Vietnamese PO file.
|
|  The syntax for a mixed PO file could like this:
|
|  msgid "Hello, world!"
|  msgid[ru] "Здравствуй, мир!"
|  msgstr "Chào thế giới !"

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gettext.git/tree/Admin/plans#n104

[2]  
http://docs.translatehouse.org/projects/translate-toolkit/en/stable-1.11.0/commands/poswap.html

Regards,
--
Daiki Ueno