Language lurker! :-)

[Ed Montgomery]

Language lurker here...

For those who might not be familiar with it, may I
mention having a look at the children's paint program,
Tuxpaint at tuxpaint.org.  They have been developing
the program for several years, and it has been
translated into over 70 languages at the moment, using
the .pot .po system.  One might find some
help/suggestions, etc. there:
http://tuxpaint.org/features/

> ET> In response to Xavier Alvarez' request on 10/25
> for
> ET> translators and coordinators, I decided to get
> off the
> ET> sidelines and take a look at OLPC's new
> Pootle-based L10N
> ET> infrastructure.
> ET>
> ET> Here are a few things I noticed which I think
> will be of
> ET> general interest and concern:
> ET>
> ET> (0) CASING/NAMING OF PO FILES PROBLEM:
> 
> The 'rule' is quite simple (but not necessarily as
> intuitive as 
> may be expected): given that we are bundling several
> d.l.o 
> projects into pootle-projects, we need to ensure (or
> at least 
> minimize the possibility) of having 2 POT files with
> the same 
> name.
> 
> Solution? We prefix whatever filename used for the
> POT in d.l.o 
> with the name of its project...
> 
> journal-activity.Journal.po
> <--dlo-project->.<filename>
> 
> Thus, any 'inconsistencies' are really product of
> other 
> inconsistencies... they just happen to be more
> evident (and ugly) 
> within Pootle.
> 
> ET>
> ET>       (Upper/Lower) Casing of names of po files
> is
> ET> inconsistent: For example, in Core there is
> ET> "journal-activity.Journal.po" with upper case
> "J" for
> ET> the 2nd occurrence of "Journal" but then why
> isn't
> ET> "write.write.po" written "write.Write.po"? 
> ET>
> ET>       This is a small point, but consistent and
> inuitive
> ET> naming of these PO files will help everyone. Or
> am I just
> ET> failing to understand or intuit what the pattern
> is supposed
> ET> to be here?
> ET>
> ET> (1)  INCONSISTENT NUMBER OF MSGIDs ACROSS
> DIFFERENT
> ET> LANGUAGES: 
> 
> Yes and no.
> 
> The numbers shown in the statistics do not represent
> quantity of 
> MSGIDs but WORDS in the file. So I presume that for
> untranslated 
> strings it takes the MSGID words, and for translated
> strings, the 
> MSGSTR. Thus two languages with all things
> translated and upto 
> date, may still show different numbers (although
> conceptually 
> they are the same). BTW, it does show the number of
> strings in 
> other 'statistic levels'.
> 
> Yes, I was quite baffled too... translators are more
> worried about 
> the word-count than 'lines of code'... ;)
> 
> In http://solar.laptop.org:5080/projects/xo_core/
> Language				Trans.	Fuzzy	Untrans. Total
> Portuguese (Brazil) 	162	42%	4	1%	213	56%	379
> Spanish 				219	62%	0	0%	132	37%	351
> 
> While in each language+project
> [pt_BR]	8 files, 162/379 words (42%) translated
> [118/247 strings]
> [es]		8 files, 219/351 words (62%) translated
> [157/234 strings]
> 
> Note that even Still, there's a difference with the
> number of 
> strings... see below.
> 
> 
> ET>
> ET>        The other day when I looked at
> write.write.po for
> ET> French, there were only 10 messages in the
> catalog.  Today, I
> ET> see that there are 36 messages which looks a lot
> closer to
> ET> what I myself get from "xgettext toolbar.py" on
> the 
=== message truncated ===


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