[Merkaartor] Translations

[Yves Goergen]

On 21.02.2009 22:20 CE(S)T, Dirk Stöcker wrote:
> Well, I do translations for about 15 years now and I find gettext system 
> which is the base for Launchpad is still the best compared to all others 
> I know. QT lingust has become better in the last years, but it causes 
> still lots of additional work (as said launchpad has missing stuff here as 
> well, especially the still missing fuzzy mechanism).

I cannot judge on gettext, I never really used it. I was just comparing
the Launchpad with the Linguist application and their user interfaces
and concepts.

Also, using Linguist and using Launchpad really are incompatible,
otherwise you wouldn't need to write an adapter for them. They are now
made compatible, with all the effort it takes. But the concepts of
shared per-item editing and whole-file committing are still different,
so the adapter needs to take special care of this and merge all changes
from either side.

And Merkaartor is a Qt application and uses Qt's translation system. So
managing translations with something else than Qt's toolset seems a bit
ridiculous to me. (Attention: personal opinion!) If gettext is so much
better (does it support the Polish version of plurals, BTW? - Not that
Qt would support it... [1]), then IMHO the reasonable way to go is
switching that mechanism in the code so that Merkaartor only depends on
gettext files and can only be edited with the according tools. But
still, the difference between Launchpad and .po (?) file editors may remain.


[1] I have developed a custom translation system for a web-based PHP
application, started in 2003 (so these were my first years with PHP...),
which now supports translation strings based on the number they are
talking about, like 0, 1, 2, 3-5, % 10 and so on. It's a relatively
complex thing now, but it can handle all special cases of the languages
it was used for, foremost Polish which seems to have complex rules about
that. Plural doesn't begin at 2, there's another form for 2 to 5 or
something like that.

-- 
Yves Goergen "LonelyPixel" <nospam.list at unclassified.de>
Visit my web laboratory at http://beta.unclassified.de