Skip to main content
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [List Home]
Re: [babel-dev] General overview of Babel wanted
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/

Back to the top