Re: [Texmacs-dev] Translations

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> 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.

As I said, this will be done later.

> 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.

Yes, but we want a support of the menus too.
If this could be done for 15 other languages, then why not for Finnish?
It just demands a few days of work, which is relatively small compared
to the time which is needed in order to write the program itself.

You may already try to find some standard .po files and
use Andrey Grozin's dictool program in order to do half(?) of the work.
In fact, if you can find a large data base with .po files,
then that would interest us. I have been trying a bit with Google,
but I could not quickly find a really appropriate thing.

> 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?

Precisely because gettext does not solve the problem you address.