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

[From: David Weinehall]

On ons, 2007-10-24 at 14:14 +0300, Mohammed Hassan wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 13:54 +0300, David Weinehall wrote:
> > On ons, 2007-10-24 at 12:47 +0300, ext Mohammed Hassan wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 12:12 +0300, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> > > > > 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?
> > > 
> > > They are used by l10n testing to easily check for untranslated strings
> > > (By me as well), to easily determine the originating UI spec, to design
> > > test cases and I'm sure they have more uses.
> > 
> > msgfmt will happily provide you with statistics about untranslated
> > strings and fuzzy translations, with the added bonus that it can be
> > automated.
> 
> Yes but it will not help differentiation _visually_ between an en_US or
> en_GB string and an Engineering English one.
> 
> It will not help quickly identifying the originating UI spec.
> 
> I got myself into this thread to see what can be done to ease the
> community involvement. I know that logical IDs are one of the problems
> but I'd say it's mainly a problem for developers more than it being a
> problem for localzsers.
> 
> Dropping the logical IDs (If it will happen. I simply do not know) will
> not happen today or tomorrow.

Well, of course, the biggest problems currently is the fact that people
are not allowed by the F:ed up license agreement to translate the
software...  But logical strings ARE a big problems for people doing
localisation, unless they're also provided with our localisation
documentation that gives all the information about what the different
logical IDs represent.  Then there's of course the string format issue,
but that is indeed a problem mostly for programmers (but it can
potentially be a big problem).

So if you can manage to convince management that opening all the
localisation documents (all lists of logical IDs and their explanations,
that is), and Nokia legal that the EULA needs to be rephrased, then I
bet most people will be satisfied, but as a programmer I cannot be happy
until we get proper strings that have the same parameter format as the
real strings, to allow for proper argument checking by the compiler.


Regards: David