From: Christian Biesinger (cbiesinger@web.de)
Date: Tue Apr 30 2002 - 03:23:48 EDT
On Mon, Apr 29, 2002 at 04:16:11PM -0700, Paul Rohr wrote:
> 1. isolate the strings
> -----------------------
> Prepare the sources so that gettext can extract strings to a .PO file.
> To make this work, I think we'd just need to redefine the existing
> *String_id.h file macros.
Actually, the only thing that needs to be done is put N_(...) around the
literal strings there (and #define N_(x) x at the top), that should be
enough for gettext to be able to extract the strings.
> 2. translate them
> ------------------
> Have the translators work with and check in .PO files. (These are a plain
> text format, right?)
Yes, plain text. They look like this:
#: src/af/xap/xp/xap_String_Id.h:1234
msgid "Some English String"
msgstr "Localized string"
Hm, I just realized that your approach does not help the case of identical
english strings in different contexts. They'd get merged together (at
least that's what the gettext tool does). If your tool would put the same
string more than once in the file, this would probably confuse translation
tools.
> 3. transform the result
> ------------------------
> At *build time*, instead of running a gettext tool to create a .MO file,
> run one that creates a strings file with the appropriate IDs.
That would require a tool which has a mapping of IDs to strings...
> NOTE: This means that people wouldn't have to create strings files by
> hand any more. So long as we have a way to keep track of the encoding (so
> iconv can find it), that shouldn't be a problem.
Couldn't your tool directly convert the strings from whatever encoding the
.po is in (the header contains this info) to UTF-8 (or another one, being
always the same) when generating the strings file?
Or would that be incompatible with the strings file format? I've never
taken a look at them...
> To make this work, we'd need two little tools -- one that creates or
> updates a PO file given a pair of appropriately macroized string_id.h files
You could use the normal gettext tools for this, if you really mark them
the way I suggested above.
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin
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