[Padre-dev] Translations - the next steps

[Patrick Donelan]

In terms of keeping translations up to date, one approach I've seen is to
attach a "last updated" timestamp to every i18n atom. For example, WebGUI (a
perl based CMS) has per-module translation files (e.g.
https://svn.webgui.org/plainblack/WebGUI/lib/WebGUI/i18n/English/).
Combining this with a public "translation server" web front-end is quite a
nice approach: see http://translate.webgui.org.

Patrick

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Gabor Szabo <szabgab at gmail.com> wrote:

> When translating Padre I can think about several levels,
> not necessarily in any order.
>
> 1) Core Padre GUI.
> 2) GUI of individual Plugins
> 3) Padre Help
> 4) Perl help
>
>
> 1) Core Padre GUI
> The most basic level is translating the core GUI.
> The share/locale/messages.pot file currently has 223 strings.
> It might grow to 500 but it is still a relatively low number.
>
> We still have to clean up the way the language is selected
> and how it is being switched
> We should also have a document describing the process one should
> follow when translating and more importantly when updating a translation.
> - how to update messages.pot ?
> - how to indicate the level of 'up-to date-ness'  in each translation file
> is?
> - how to find out what has been changed or what is still missing from the
>  translation file?
>
> 2) GUI of individual Plugins.
> While the core Padre developers don't have to do this we are - at
> least for now -
> also the main plugin developers. In any case we should write a document
> on how to translate plugins and we should provide the API for the
> translation.
>
> 3) Padre Help
> Even the English version of the user documentation is lacking lots
> of information so we should work on that too but we should also define a
> way
> how to allow translation of the documents to other languages.
>
> 4) Perl help
> While at some point we might move the whole Perl 5 support out to be a
> plugin
> I'd like to devote a large effort to make it more user friendly
>
> After all one of my objectives with Padre is to make Perl more accessible
> to beginners.
>
> Part of this is making the Perl documentation and error messages more
> beginner friendly.
> I don't want to try to change the core documentation for at least three
> reasons.
> 1) It is much more difficult to do
> 2) even if we did it has a very long cycle thill it gets to the users.
> 3) It is still only in English
>
> It includes the creation of call-tips that are easier to understand without
> being already familiar with C or Unix.
> It includes providing perl documentation that is simpler to understand.
> It also includes making some of this available in other (human) languages.
> It also includes having a better (or just translated) explanation of the
> warnings and error messages.
>
> We already have the call-tips (View/Show Call Tips) that are fetched from
> share/languages/perl5/perl5.yml
> We need a way to have translated versions of that file in various
> languages.
>
> Of course in the end most of this last part - the Perl help part - should
> not
> be Padre specific so we should make it in a way that can be later moved
> out from the Padre package and reused by other tools.
>
> Your input is highly appreciated.
>
> Gabor
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