[Freeciv-Dev] call for updated translations

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Freeciv translators,

This is to invite you to update your freeciv translation files,
in preparation for the upcoming 1.9.0 stable release.  Lots of
strings have been marked (including lots since 1.8.3 beta), so 
there is plenty to do!

I have updated the po files in cvs to match the current freeciv.pot
(using 'make update-po' in the po directory).  If you don't want
to get them from CVS or a snapshot (should be in Oct-10 when that 
is made) I have also placed the updated po files (gzipped) in:

ftp://ftp.freeciv.org/freeciv/contrib/development/l10n/

These updated files include some entries marked as:

#, fuzzy

If you are not familiar with gettext, these entries require
special treatment which you should know about.  (Actually, 
I'm no gettext expert, so any corrections to these comments
are welcome :-)

Fuzzy entries have translations filled in based on fuzzy string
matches to previously translated msgid strings.  The purpose of
this is so that if there are minor changes to the msgid strings,
the translations may need only similarly minor fixes.  However
sometimes the fuzzy matches are simply wrong, and the included
translations are useless (though sometimes amusingly so :-)

Because these fuzzy translations typically require some fixing, 
and sometimes major fixing, they are not used by gettext while
they are marked as fuzzy.  So when you as translator fix these 
strings, you should remove the line with "#, fuzzy", so that the 
fixed translations will then be used.

There is still some code work needed to improve the i18n, and
probably some more strings to be marked, but there will probably
not be much more done before 1.9.0, so translating the current
po files would be good to do now.

One particular problem is that there is still use of the
function n_if_vowel() to generate "a" vs "an", but I don't
know a good way to fix this, and again it probably won't
be fixed before 1.9.0 is released.

I am hopeful that freeciv 1.9.0 will be released soon, so 
translations should be done as soon as possible (say, probably 
within about a week) in order to go into the 1.9.0 release.

Happy translating!

Regards,
-- David