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[babel-dev] General overview of Babel wanted
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Hi,
I'm new to Babel and want to help translating Eclipse into German.
I'm a very experienced Open Source translator (XML/SGML/gettext(PO) based,
don't know anything about Java because of it's propritary state in the
past) and currently translate a lot for Debian (website, complete books,
programs). Yesterday I started translating Subclipse (a Subversion
plugin for Eclipse).
I have a few questions and didn't found any website with this
information.
* Does there exist documentation about Babel other than
http://www.eclipse.org/babel/ and it's direct links?
* What is the license of the translations, it it the same as the
corresponding plugin source code? Are all projects in Babel share
a common license?
* How can one translate. Is there only the webfrontend? How to work
offline?
* Where can I find statistics?
* The most problematic issue with Java style of translations (using
property files) seems that
* At least I (and many, many other Open Source translators) don't know
it :-((
* English strings are separated from the translation (solved in
the web frontend, great!). I wonder how you can ensure that
translations are in sync? What happens if a English message is
rewritten (maybe only a typo changed which doesn't affect
translations, maybe not ...)?
* What tools exist to recode property files into proper encodings
such as UTF-8 (iconv?) (for further processings, scripts to check
for proper shortcuts, spell checking, ...)
* Exists a common message catalog (e.g. filled with all current
translations which can be used to provide a rough initial
translation (even fuzzy messages as known from PO files which are
not used by default but look very similar to existing strings so
that large parts of such a message translation can be reused after
editing, would be useful)?
* How do you avoid that the same message needs to be translated
multiple times (even the single Subclipse plugin had some strings
duplicated approximately 20 times!!!!!)
* Since there exist dozens of tools for PO files (vim macros, kbabel,
GNOME programs, spell checker and of course the usual msg* suite of
programs (msgfmt, msgmerge, msgcat, ...) wouldn't it be useful to
provide also PO files? Converting between property files (are they
really a good thing?) and PO files should not very hard, writing a
script for it should be simple.
* How to search for a message? I found e.g. that the German
translation of the Eclipse Info dialog contains a lot of new line
escape sequences:
Eclipse SDK\n\
\n\
Version: 3.2.0\n\
Build-ID: M20080221-1800\n\
You see really don't know a lot about Java.
Further remark:
* The online translation portal displays *completely* as garbage
with the very common KDE Konqueror browser, version 3.5.5.
Version 4.0.2 displays it correctly (as Firefox does) but isn't
used very often (still unstable).
* What was the reason that using an outdated language pack of Eclipse
before Babel existed was completely useless with a slighty more
up-to-date Eclipse version? I remember that even most elementary
strings such as "Open" were no longer translated once I upgraded
to a 3.2 (?) snapshot.
There are probably more questions ...
Jens