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

[From: Mohammed Hassan]

On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 15:33 +0300, ext Igor Stoppa wrote:
> Hi,
> On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 15:14 +0300, ext Kimmo Hämäläinen wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 14:56 +0300, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> > > Kimmo Hämäläinen <kimmo.hamalainen at nokia.com> writes:
> > > 
> > > > Wrong.  It would depend on the context and language.
> > > 
> > > Yes, it COULD, fer-crying-out-loudly. :) We have the data now to
> > > figure out whether it actually DOES for the set of our supported
> > > languages.
> > 
> > 'For the set of our supported languages' -- quoting you -- 'that way
> > lies madness'. You would need to do this verification every time you add
> > a new language, or change the context a bit.
> > 
> > > > And what happens when you add a new, more 'context-sensitive'
> > > > language?
> > > 
> > > We change the code.  Simple.  Providing unneeded context is bad in my
> > > opinion, and the way we do it with the logical ids is excessivly ugly.
> > 
> > You also need to retranslate and test all the supported languages for
> > the new strings (some of that you could maybe automate). Changing the
> > code is the easy part. Why not make the engineering English unique, and
> > use it instead of the logical ids ("OK 1", "OK 2" ;)), hey, we do it
> > with variable names in code already...
> 
> FWIW, here's my 2cents:
> I don't use localised images simply because i find revolting what is the
> commonly understood "right way" of translating english terms to italian
> and therefore i wouldn't really be of any help.
> 
> Hence my contribution in that direction is nil.
> 
> Then enters the logical_ids: I get 8cm long strings on a button that is
> designed to accept 6-8 characters (btw, that also would be affected by
> certain localizations, but let's ignore it for the moment).
> 
> So even where i _could_ be of some help in providing feedback, I cannot
> because i have no clue of what the logical id means.
> 
> And i am not going to read the UI specs just for that.
> 
> I suppose this applies to many others, here. So logical IDs semm to be a
> nice way to hide away logical errors.

You are not supposed to provide feedback (It's greatly appreciated if
you do for sure). All the above problems can be solved. POT files (With
logical IDs as msgids and engineering english as msgstrs) can be
generated from the UI specs easily. I can provide them too. All your
problems can be solved ;-)


-- 
Localization Engineer
Open Source Software Operations