[babel-dev] General overview of Babel wanted

[Jens Seidel <jensseidel@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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