Subject: Re: Internationalisation of Gnome dialogs
From: Tim Allen (rita_tim@tpg.com.au)
Date: Tue Jun 20 2000 - 05:52:38 CDT
On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Joaqu?n Cuenca Abela wrote:
> El Mon, 19 Jun 2000, escribiste:
> > Bob's report of persistent English text in the goto dialog made me realise
> > there is a general problem with the Gnome dialogs. They all use stock
> > Gnome buttons, which are apparently not internationalised. So a stock
> > Gnome Next button says "Next", for example, and not
> > AP_STRING_ID_DIALOG_GOTO_BTN_NEXT.
> >
> > Now presumably the Gnome buttons _are_ internationalisable... I would be
>
> The text of the stock buttons have to be localized in the gnome-libs package.
> Usually, the gnome sotck buttons are localized to many languages. Please, can
> you test:
>
> export LANG="fr" (for instance)
> abiword
>
> and see if the gnome stock buttons are localized to frech?
Ah, yes, OK, I see. When I perform this test, I get a dialog with a
mixture of Indonesian and French text, as you were no doubt expecting.
> Can you try now export LANG="xx" (where xx is your favorite language),
> reexecute abiword and see if it works?
No, it doesn't, I just get English, because there is no Indonesian
translation available for Gnome.
> In short, the gnome version DOESN'T care about the translation that
> Abiword provides for the stock buttons. It only see the translation
> that gnome provides (and you will turn on the localization with export
> LANG="xx").
So we have two options: either provide an Indonesian translation of
Gnome... Or find a way to cheat and make AbiWord use its own translation
for Gnome widgets.
I have a feeling that if I were to undertake the former plan (in addition
to providing the id_ID translation for AbiWord), my wife and son would
raise some objections :-). They already begrudge time I spend at home
engrossed in front of the computer.
So, plan B, is it possible to somehow override Gnome's choice of text to
make use of AbiWord's strings? And if it is possible, do we want to?
I've just had a quick wander around the i18n/l10n web pages at Gnome, and
see that most of our other languages do have some sort of reasonably
complete translation, at least for gnome-libs. Maybe id_ID is the odd
language out.
Is this a general issue? Do any of our other platforms provide
translations of some of their interface widgets? I guess at the least the
file open/save dialogs on most platforms are localised.
I certainly never set out to translate a whole operating system; surely
there's a way this can be avoided?
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Joaquín Cuenca Abela
> e-mail: cuenca@ie2.u-psud.fr
Tim
-- ----------------------------------------------------------- Tim Allen http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/rita_tim/ tim@proximity.com.au rita_tim@tpg.com.au
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