| Re: [babel-dev] Release strategy needed |
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Hi Jens, My comments follow... Jens Seidel wrote: [snip] This is exactly the problem we are tackling here -- a bad translation. The English string is OK.This means that invalid PO files will never be used. It is of course possible that a translation is wrong, contains typos 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 Yes, that is what I was suggesting... We know the English string is good, we simply need something to evaluate the translated values, syntactically.So I suggest you just add a similar check to your Java format strings. 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.I'm curious, why do you invent basic i18n and l10n tools again? 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. 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: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? http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.babel/server/?root=Technology_Project It probably wasn't i8lized properly as I have described above.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. Thanks. From what I've seen so far, the quality of the Babel community's translations is quite high.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. 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 --
Denis Roy Manager, IT Infrastructure Eclipse Foundation, Inc. -- http://www.eclipse.org/ denis.roy@xxxxxxxxxxx Register now for Eclipse Summit Europe, Nov. 19-20 |