RFC: i18n proposal

[Jeff Johnson]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 04:57:32PM +0100, Pedro Morais wrote:
> Em Quinta, 24 de Julho de 2003 16:42, Jeff Johnson escreveu:
> > The really important issue is that i18n is lots and lots of work from
> > a team of people. IMHO, the work is best left to for-pay translators
> > (and editors, hackers are not necessarily the best redactors) by commercial
> > entities like Red Hat.
> 
> My 2 person team has sucessfully translated all KDE releases since the  1.x 
> days and Red Hat Linux from about 7 to European Portuguese.
> For some "smaller" countries like Portugal (10 million persons) you just can't 
> wait that some day Red Hat will want to support a localized version.
> 
> The only problem we've faced so far with the specspo approach is that it's
> not regenerated enough times during a beta cicle; just look at the logs and
> see how many times it has been regenerated during the 8.0.x days.
> Volunteers work on their own free time so the earlier the specspo pot file
> is regenerated the bigger the change we'll find some time to update it.
> For example, it could use an update right now.

What needs "update"? New package additions not extracted into C.po all
ready to go for you? Or do you mean that the just translated msgid's
have changed in "fuzzy" ways.

Yes, package additions *require* addition to C.po in order for the
translation process to work.

"Fuzzy" is even more complicated, ultimately depends on which of the
following entities should "own" the text that appears in msgid's:
	a) upstream maintainers
	b) distro packagers/developers
	c) editors
	d) translators

Any of a) through d) is a possible/reasonable candidate for "ownership".

Choose one, and a reasonable process flow that efficiently gets the
translations performed and distributed is quite easy.

OTOH, choose none or all of the above, and you will have a very complicated,
difficult to administer, process, much like Red Hat's current process.

Lest there be any mistake: Red Hat has managed to do a quite reasonable
job of getting translations for packages. Sure, not every locale is there,
sure there's lots of glitches, but overall, I believe the process is
pretty sound.

Disclaimer: I used to, but not for years, be responsible for Red Hat
package i18n.

73 de Jeff

-- 
Jeff Johnson	ARS N3NPQ
jbj at redhat.com (jbj at jbj.org)
Chapel Hill, NC