Subject: Re: Translation, gettext and po
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Nov 08 2000 - 23:42:17 CST
Hi Tim,
Joaquin would be very please with this contribution. I think the
perl scripts should be placed in the abi main directory along with the
dumpstrings.pl script. This is step in the direction to use gettext which
is much easier for both developers and translators.
If there are no complaints I will commit this.
Cheers
Martin
On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, Tim Allen wrote:
> Faced with some more work to get the id-ID translation up to date, I've written
> a couple of Perl scripts to make life easier.
>
> The attached script abi2po.pl converts the strings in AbiWord for one language
> to a form that resembles a gettext po file, explicitly labelling any missing
> strings as MISSING. A po file is _much_ easier to maintain than the current
> AbiWord strings files, since you have all the text for English and your target
> language in the one place, together.
>
> The other script, po2abi.pl does the reverse; it converts the po-ish file back
> to an AbiWord strings file. I've tested this on id-ID, and the round trip
> works
> well. Haven't tested it on any other languages, so no idea whether there are
> any problems for languages that make more demanding use of character sets or
> whatever. Let me know :-).
>
> The format of the pseudo-po file contains a comment that provides the link
> with
> the AbiWord string id. Don't edit the comment if you want the reverse process
> to work.
>
> I found it too hard (ie I was lazy :)) to properly parse the credits, and
> preserve them in a round trip, so I copped out and supported a file of the
> form
> <lang>.credits which po2abi.pl reads in and puts in the file (with a bland
> placeholder if the file is missing). I've attached my sample id-ID.credits
> just
> to make sure the idea is clear.
>
> This does not (yet) support the menu and toolbar text.
>
> The primary motivation for this is to make translating easier. A secondary
> consideration is that at some future stage we may want to convert AbiWord to
> using gettext for i18n. This should make that job much easier.
>
> The attached po.doc file gives more details about how to use the scripts.
>
> I'm not sure if this should be part of the main distribution, and if so, where
> it should go; I shall leave that to others to decide. I think that most
> translators will find it useful, so I definitely think it should be made
> available generally. I relied heavily on Owen Stenseth's dumpstrings.pl script
> as a starting point.
>
> Tim
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Tim Allen http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/rita_tim/
> tim@proximity.com.au rita_tim@tpg.com.au
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