Re: [Texmacs-dev] Translations

[Teemu Ikonen]

On 06/11/02 11:24, David Allouche wrote:
[...]
> The translation dictionnaries are WAY too big, and there is NO
> separation whatsoever between GUI translations, style translatian and
[...]
> That can cause some confusion when trying to make translations because
> one need to know the context, and that makes it very difficult to make
> partial translations (just the styles, just the doc, just the GUI).
[...]
> But the really important point here (there have been some discussion
> on #texmacs) is that the "File" menu and the "File" label in the
> get-file dialog must not be translated to the same word in Swedish.
[...]
> Also, the current translation scheme hardwires the syntactic structure
> of phrases and mix thi sin the code. That is very bad. Actually, the

David has some very good points here. I went through the first few hundred
strings in english-new.scm yesterday and found that a decent translation is
almost impossible if you don't know the context of the word (menu, style,
help etc.). One could do the translation iteratively by improving the wrong
translations obtained by guessing the context the first time, but I still
think that separating different translations would be a cleaner solution.

For me (and I'd say to about 90% of potential TeXmacs users in academia in
Finland) translation of the style files would make TeXmacs immediately much,
much more usable than it is now. We're very used to dealing with English
menus etc. (I know people who refuse to use translated software even if it's
available), but you really can't write a paper in Finnish with English
stylesheets.

The problem of hardwiring syntax into the translation and that different
concepts map to same words in English, but not necessarily in other
languages is probably much worse in Finnish than in other European
languages, as Finnish belongs to a different language family altogether. I
have practically zero experience on internationalization, but if gettext has
somehow solved this problem, why reinvent the wheel?

Best wishes,

Teemu