[freeciv-i18n] Re: how to make www.freeciv.org translatable

[Christian Knoke <chrisk@xxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 06:59:56PM +0200, Reinier Post wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 13, 2002 at 06:45:44PM +0200, Christian Knoke wrote:
> > 
> > >   - adopt gettext: maintain a list of translatable strings that occur 
> > > within
> > >     the files on the site, and ask translators to translate this list
> > 
> > I wonder whether this is a way to go. It surely has a disadvantage:
> > Every translation needs to be as complete as possible. The user
> > will see english text all the time if it is not.
> 
> I don't understand - isn't this the case already?

I have made the assumption, that, if gettext will be introduced, the
portions of text to translate will be paragraph-, sentence-, or item-wise,
_not_ page-wise. Then, if  an item changes or is added in the original page,
the text on the localized page will be partly (e.g.) german, partly english.

The advantages named below are based on this assumption.

> > On the other hand I think a (nearly) complete translation would be good to 
> > have.
> > 
> > The plusses are many:
> > 
> > - We can translate paragraph by paragraph or item by item. If some
> >   information changes, we'll see the FUZZY mark. Right now it's hard
> >   to see when things get obsolete.
> > 
> > - No need to hassle with html or php.
> > 
> > - The user will not miss any information due to a incomplete translation.
> > 
> > - The user will not miss any information due to a obsolete translation
> >   (because the fuzzy things will be replaced by the engllish text auto-
> >   matically).
> > 
> > - The user won't have to decide whether read the english or german pages.
> >   She will always go to the german (french ...) pages.
> > 
> > What I'm not sure with is how easy/hard it will be to translate those
> > po files. It would be a must that paragraphs which belong together (because
> > they are on the same page) are subsequent in the po file(s).
> 
> It would be best if the translatable strings don't need to be marked
> explicitly, but can be extracted automatically.  For well-formed HTML
> and XML this is not very hard to do, for PHP files a bit of guesswork
> is required.

Yes.

> Reinier

Christian

-- 
Christian Knoke     * * *      http://www.enter.de/~c.knoke/
* * * * * * * * *  Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse dividendum.