Hi Jens,
Here's my best try at answering all your questions. As you may know,
the Babel project is still in its infancy, so some of our tools (and
processes) are not completely developed or defined yet.
Jens Seidel wrote:
Hi,
* Does there exist documentation about Babel other than
http://www.eclipse.org/babel/ and it's direct links?
The above page is pretty much it. Perhaps the best page for you is
this one:
http://www.eclipse.org/babel/development/
* 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?
The downloadable packs from Babel are under the Eclipse Public License
[1]. All the projects in Babel are Eclipse projects, which all share
the EPL. I've added a link to the EPL from our downloads page; it was
indeed missing.
http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl/notice.php
* How can one translate. Is there only the webfrontend? How to work
offline?
There is a web frontend at http://babel.eclipse.org. An Eclipse
plugin, to work offline, is in the works. One can also work offline by
working with the Java .properties files directly and contributing large
amounts of translations as described in this document,
although this is not very elegant.
* Where can I find statistics?
We only have basic stats on the translation tool home page, and each file has a
completion statistics visible in the web tool. More stats are in the
works.
* 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 ...)?
We fetch the English strings nightly. If an English string has
changed, its corresponding translations are flagged as Possibly
Incorrect in our database. This flag is not yet visible in the Babel
UI yet. I've opened a bug to track the implementation of this :
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=230949
* 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, ...)
We use an in-house PHP script that builds the language packs. The
source can be viewed here:
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.babel/server/classes/export/generate1.php?root=Technology_Project&view=markup
* 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)?
We don't have such a feature, although it has been requested.
* 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!!!!!)
Upon every 'save', our tools crawls the database looking for exact
matches (case sensitive) of the English text, and will automatically
translate all matches across all projects where no translation exists.
This is useful for translating strings like "True", "Ok" and "Cancel".
* 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.
I'm not familiar enough with PO files to comment.
* 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\
Our tool currently lacks a search/find function, but a feature request
has been opened for one.
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).
Although Konqueror is shipped with KDE, it is not a browser platform
that we target specifically. Perhaps we should state the browser
requirements on the babel tool home?
* 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.
I *think* it has something to do with the usage of a new plugin version
identifier in 3.3. Prior to 3.3, one could use older language packs
and get a good percentage of translations out of it. I could be wrong
here.
Thanks for your comment and your feedback. If there is anything we can
do to make it easier to contribute to Babel, please let us know.
Denis
--
Denis Roy
Manager, IT Infrastructure
Eclipse Foundation, Inc. -- http://www.eclipse.org/
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