[maemo-developers] Maemo localization to officially non-supported languages

[From: Mohammed Hassan]

On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 14:01 +0300, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> "ext Mohammed Hassan" <mohammed.2.hassan at nokia.com> writes:
> 
> > What I'd propose is we/I replace the logical IDs with Engineering
> > English in the POT files you use to translate and convert them back
> > upon packaging and building.
> 
> One immediate problem I see with this is that multiple logical ids can
> map to the same Engineering English string, so you can't reliably
> reverse the mapping.

I think using msgid_comment can solve that.

> (Also, the code itself should start using Engineering English itself,
> of course, to make it more useful to external developers that don't
> have the UI specs, and because that is how God intended it to be
> done. :-)

The problem is the logical IDs are needed to maintain the smooth process.
It's not easy to simply drop them. I did not say it's impossible. I didn't
say it'll be done or it'll not. I'm just saying that they are needed ;-)

I completely understand the FOSS way. I have my own Free Software projects.
It's just that the situation is different


> It would be interesting to take our current translations and mine them
> for the logical ids that map to the same Engineering English, but at
> the same time have different translations in some language.  These are
> the cases where we would need to use the "menu|Open" construct in the
> code instead of the existing Engineering English string.  Identifying
> and handling these cases is where I see a large part of the effort
> needed to move away from logical ids, so it would be good to get an
> overview.

Multiple logical IDs with the same Engineering English string are needed
because the translation might change according to the context.


> Once that has been dealt with, we could consider using your scheme, or
> we could consider Engineering English instead of logical ids
> everyhwere in our processes.
-- 
Localization Engineer
Open Source Software Operations