Hi Jens,
My comments follow...
Jens Seidel wrote:
[snip]
This means that invalid PO files will never be used. It is of course possible
that a translation is wrong, contains typos
This is exactly the problem we are tackling here -- a bad translation.
The English string is OK.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your points, I think you have a
misconception about Babel. Eclipse, and the Eclipse projects that are
being translated with Babel, already have their English strings
externalized using PDE-based tools and processes, so we (Babel)
don't need gettext, and neither are we reinventing gettext. Babel
simply consumes plain-text files that contain key/value pairs of
English strings that look like this:
buttonLabelText=Click Here To Continue
message_1=Welcome to Eclipse. Press F1 for help, F2 to open the
Workbench.
This blog post offers a bird's eye view of PDE's string externalization
tools:
http://mea-bloga.blogspot.com/2007/12/externalizing-strings-with-pde.html
So I suggest you just add a similar check to your Java format strings.
Yes, that is what I was suggesting... We know the English string is
good, we simply need something to evaluate the translated values,
syntactically.
I'm curious, why do you invent basic i18n and l10n tools again?
We're not. As I mentioned, I think you're (mistakenly) assuming we
reinvented gettext. We didn't. Babel starts with externalized
strings. When Eclipse projects haven't properly externalized their
English strings, they cannot use the Babel community for
translations... See
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=241848 as an example.
The scope of Babel is to leverage the community to translate those
externalized strings. The web UI translation tool (at
http://babel.eclipse.org/) started with a code contribution from a
company called Aptana, so again, we're not inventing any tools here.
We have taken the tools that have been donated and we're are evolving
them.
I agree that you did a very good job. The web frontend looks great and
it simplifies collaboration. Well done! But have you considered to
reuse existing projects or to share your work for other translation
attempts?
Thanks. As mentioned, our project started with a code contribution for
a Web-based translation tool, and a very large set of translations for
Eclipse 3.2 (donated by IBM), so please understand -- nothing has been
invented here at Babel, it's all reuse. Others are free to consume our
translations by downloading the NL fragments, and others are free to
download and use the web-based translation tool we're working on, as it
is in CVS:
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.babel/server/?root=Technology_Project
I only once tried to translate an Eclipse plugin (Subclipse) and it was
hard. The file to be translated wasn't even a simple text file
(contained a funny encoding) and did not even contained English strings
as template.
It probably wasn't i8lized properly as I have described above.
I know from the Ubuntu Linux distribution that the quality of web based
translations (without required authorisation) can be very, very bad. So
I think that language champions are a very good idea.
Thanks. From what I've seen so far, the quality of the Babel
community's translations is quite high.
Jens, I hope the information within this email helps clarify where
Babel has come from and what Babel is doing. If not, please ask
questions and I will gladly attempt to provide more information.
Denis
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