[Mythtv-translators] [mythtv] [mythtv-commits] Ticket #9128: [PATCH

Nicolas RIendeau knight at teksavvy.com
Fri Oct 22 17:23:56 UTC 2010


Hi!

I'm redirecting this to the translator's ML, if you reply to this message 
please remove the dev ML from the list of recipient. If at all possible 
when tickets deal with translation related matters please try to redirect 
the discussion to the Mythtv-translators mailing list.

> On 22-10-2010 16:18, Jos Hoekstra wrote:
> > Because I've only translated on a ad-hoc basis I don't really know how
> > to facilitate the translation itself.
> > Foppe is in the same boat so to say and it would be better to make >
> translation easier so it's more attractive for people to translate.
> I think MythTV could benefit from some sort of structural website that
> allows translators to easily update strings.
> 
> In another project I work in Pootle is used [1], [2]. Perhaps that might
> be a nice feature to have for MythTV as well.

On a per translation basis I would have no problem with it as long as it 
produces files which are compatible with what Qt produces in *every* way.

Personnally I would be against forcing everybody to use this though... Some 
people have already established review processes and correcting a string 
and reverifying it in context can take less than a minute with Qt Linguist 
which is not the case with these sites.

I tried two similar sites recently...

The first one could deal with Qt files directly.

As far as the interface was concerned you more or less loss the notion of 
context (though not totally) which helps when you do the translation. 
Everything more or less ended up on the same page.

It could use Google translate (and other sites too I believe) and it gave 
relatively good results but they were not as good as what a real person 
could do (or is sometimes force to do because of space constraints).

Its cons:

- It took close to 15 minutes to load a MythFrontend's translation.
- The files I got back from this site (so that I could apply them back to 
my checkout of MythTV) were *corrupted*...

The second site I played with could not deal with Qt files directly, you 
had to convert them to .po.

Here too you lost, at least partially, the notion of context.

The main problem here was that it could not deal with Qt files directly 
(only po) and there is a low interest on the part of its maitainers to make 
it work with Qt files.

I converted a file to .po to try it and overall the .po format seems to 
keep most of the info the Qt file had. 

I haven't tried it with languages which have particularities such as no 
singular/plural forms or more than singular/plural forms (some languages 
make a differences between 2 and more than 2 (plural)) to see if it can 
deal with these (Qt/Qt Linguist can...)

I haven't tried Pootle yet... It does look like it support Qt files 
natively which makes it interesting...

> 
> This would give users a simple, uniform interface which is easy to work
> with.

Qt Linguist is pretty easy to use and does offer a simply, uniform 
interface which is easy to work wih.

> It is easy to see what strings need to be translated

Qt Linguist does that but only on a per translation file basis.

> for which language and what part of the project.

Nick Morrott's translation status page does this job nicely I think.

> Patches can then be autogenerated and added to the source at
> predetermined points in time, for instance, before release(-candidates)
> and the like.

That would make our (Kenni and I) job easier but not the translator's since 
yuo would not be able to see your translation in context until we extract 
the translations and commit them.

There would always be the possibility of doing it yourself but then you are 
back with the same issues you have when you translation with Qt Linguist 
(or even a text editor), applying patches and other similar things...

I think Qt Linguist does a pretty good job (it makes it easy to search for 
strings, it proposes translations, it easily shows unfinished translations, 
etc...) but there is a lot of things that must be done manually outside of 
it which does make the translation process harder than it could be.

I am not sure however that everybody uses Qt Linguist, it looks like some 
people are editing the .ts files manually which soon becomes very difficult 
to do.

Have a nice day!

Nick



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