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

[From: Mohammed Hassan]

On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 14:19 +0300, David Weinehall wrote:
> 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).

"Our loxalisation documentation" is the UI specs ?


> 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,

I never checked/had a copy of the EULA. I need to know 1st what do you
mean by "localisation documents".


>  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.

This is not my call. Bug the UI spec designer. What I do is to ensure
that the format of the translations is the same as the format of
engineering English. I guarantee that.

-- 
Localization Engineer
Open Source Software Operations