Re [Adonthell-general] About translation

[Kai Sterker]

> I'm trying to give a hand to Clement with the french translation of
> Waste's Edge.
>
> This leads me to think, could the po files be separated ? As it is, it
> seems rather complicated to form translation teams, as 2 or more people
> can't really work on only one file...

I'm no expert with GNU gettext, but the common practise seems to be to
have one po file per "package", i.e. application.


> So it could be good to separate each "section" in a different po file.
> This way, different people could work on different parts. Let's say for
> example that Clement works on the first par of the game, while I'm
> translating the second one. When one of us finishes, he can send his
> work to the other, so that playing the game, each one can review the
> other's work.

Did you have a look at utilities like msgcat or msgmerge that should
help to integrate changes made by different individuals into a common
.po file. Haven't used them myself, but the gettext manual has some
information about them:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/index.html

BTW., dlgedit (the tool used to create the dialogues in the first
place) has an option to load a .mo file in order to preview each
translated line in context of the previous and following line. I have
to check, but the v0.4 version of dlgedit should be able to load the
v0.3 dialogues (found in the wastesedge CVS module under
scripts/dialogues/src). Alternatively, you could download an older
v0.3 source package where dlgedit build is still enabled (but new
enough to actually contain that feature). I"ll look more into that, as
I think this would be helpful for quality control. Playing the actual
game also works, but it'll be hard to see all the possible
combinations there.

Of course, some parts of the translation that is not contained in
dialogues can only be checked in game.


> Having separate po files might also help using the CVS repository for
> translation (more than one people working on a single file might
> generate conflicts hard to resolve).

Hm ... this could be a problem indeed, although if each of you agrees
on a part of the file to work on, there shouldn't be any conflicts.


> PS: having separate smaller files also makes the translator thinks that
> there isn't that much work to do ^^

Yeah, that's true :-). That's also why I really appreciate the work
you and Clement are doing. It _is_ a lot of work!

Kai