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

[From: Marius Vollmer]

Mohammed Hassan <mohammed.2.hassan at nokia.com> writes:

> 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.

Yes, I think so, too.

> 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 ;-)

This might be so, but I honestly doubt it.  Can you elaborate?

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

Yeah, we all know that not all things are the same.  But that's a
useless argument.  Don't try to argue from authority.

>> 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.

Yes, of course.  Some logical ids map to the same Engineering English,
and some map to unique Engineering English strings.  I am saying that
it would be interesting to get a concrete list of the logical ids that
map to the same Engineering English, to get an idea about how much
work is needed when moving away from logical ids.

For example, I have 9 logical ids that map to "OK", and 9 that map to
"Cancel" in the hildon-application-manager .po file:

    $ msgunfmt /usr/share/locale/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/hildon-application-manager.mo | grep -B 1 '"OK"'
    msgid "ai_bd_add_catalogue_ok"
    msgstr "OK"
    --
    msgid "ai_bd_confirm_ok"
    msgstr "OK"
    --
    msgid "ai_bd_license_ok"
    msgstr "OK"
    --
    msgid "ai_bd_new_repository_ok"
    msgstr "OK"
    --
    msgid "ai_bd_notice_ok"
    msgstr "OK"
    --
    msgid "ai_bd_ok"
    msgstr "OK"
    --
    msgid "ai_bd_search_ok"
    msgstr "OK"
    --
    msgid "ai_bd_select_location_ok"
    msgstr "OK"
    --
    msgid "ai_bd_settings_ok"
    msgstr "OK"

What would we do about them?  In this case I'd say we don't need any
context and just providing one translation for "OK" is OK.

There are other instances where we might need some context.  We have
enough real-world data in our translations now that we don't need to
talk about this in the abstract.

Maybe I am getting ahead of you guys here.