Re: [Texmacs-dev] Translations

[David Allouche]

On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 01:31:26PM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> 
> > The translation dictionnaries are WAY too big, and there is NO
> > separation whatsoever between GUI translations, style translatian and
> > since 1.0.0.20 help section titles translations (actually help menu
> > entries).
> 
> I already told you that this separation will be done once that
> plugins are implemented in a better way.

Sorry, but I read that answer (on texmacs-users, I believe) after I
wrote my message.

Anyway, I have no time to do the separation myself now, but I wish I
could. There is no need to change much infrastructure to do a simple
separation.

> > Moreover, there is no way to dismiss dictionnary entries which are no
> > longer needed because the corresponding GUI items have been renamed.
> 
> Well, such entries could be dismissed.
> Who wants to make up the list of those entries?
> You might want to use "strings texmacs.bin" and
> write an automatic analyzer of scheme menus.

Yes, that could be done. I add a task entry for this on Savannah.

> > 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.
> 
> I told you 100 times that this will be changed as soon as
> I have time to implement a tree-based translation scheme
> (a couple of days of work).

I would really like if you can tell us what you are up to.

In which way would that be superior to the format-string approach?

How would that address the problem of
words-which-are-not-always-translated-the-same?

> > I do not intend to make the usual rant "we should use gettext in order
> > to leverage numerous existing translation support tools, exploit the
> > .po corpus of free desktop project and not reinvent the wheel one more
> > time"... well... I just did.
> 
> If you do not intend to rant, then please don't.

That was a bite of humour.
              ^ (that is one two)
                              ^ (that is one too).

> With Andrey Grozin's tool, we *are* already able to use the .po corpus.
> So if you want to fill out missing translations for new languages,
> then please go ahead!

Which tools?? Where can they be dowloaded? Did I miss a prominent link
on TeXmacs web page or on Wiki?

What I really mean is using GUI tools like KBabel which do ease
maintenance of localizations a lot, but are based on PO.

> From a technical point of view, it is clear that .po files are a bad
> system for the future, because the only "grammar rules" which you
> can provide are string concatenations at predefined places.
> What one really needs is a tree-based tool.

That sounds great... but I do not see the problem with format strings.
And what does that tree-based tool is going to do?

Really, I do not mean to bother you, but I fear that localization of
TeXmacs is becoming such a big work... The evolution of the GUI should
not be impaired by the need of conserving the translation, but on the
other hand we should find ways to lower the maintenance burden for
translators.

-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
   address@hidden  |    address@hidden
TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.