VÃctor, let me try to answer your questions.
1. Externalize all Strings that are subject to be shown in the UI from
our plugins (in our case, I expect only UI and Exceptions are subject to
be shown). Use JDT and PDE tooling to externalize strings.
Answer: correct
2. Create a babel map. If I understand it correctly, this is kind of a
file that exposes which externalized Strings can be translated by the
Babel community. I saw this is done through a webapp. The first thing I
see is our project does not appear, which I understand since we are not
top level project under modeling, but rather under modeling.emf. How can
we add our component to this list? Is there anything we should do?
Answer: We pull the information from a data bridge to Eclipse Bugzilla.
If you don't see your project, please open a bug against Babel/Server.
4. Perform PTT to see everything is fine?
How is exactly the Pseudo Translation Test performed? I believe I should
download the PTT plugin and then configure eclipse.ini to use it? Which
is the flag I should use? If I understood correctly:
a. Hard-coded strings don't have prefix
b. Externalized Strings have prefix. If the string has the prefix, what
does it exactly mean?
Question: where is the index file that maps prefix to file containing
the string?
Answer: There are 2 ways to get the pseudo translation language packs,
either through the Babel update site, or the downlable zips. See
http://www.eclipse.org/babel/downloads.php for more info. After
installing the language packs, start Eclipse with -nl en_AA. After that,
just run your project normally. You will see most of the strings with a
special prefix like "eclipse123456:". If a string does not have a
prefix, it usually means the string is hard-coded in the code. The added
length of the prefix will help you test truncation problems. For
example, if a button is not coded correctly, the new label
"eclipse123456:OK" will be truncated. The prefix can also tell you which
project does the string come from. The index number can be used to
locate the exact key in the properties that it's coming from. The index
file can be found in the pesudo translation feature for the project.
This is the path for the Eclipse index file for example:
eclipse\features\org.eclipse.babel.nls_eclipse_en_AA_3.5.0.v20090406043401\BabelPseudoTranslationsIndex-eclipse.html