[Fedora-i18n-list] Formation of new translation team - Chinese (Hong Kong)

[Abel Cheung]

On 12/22/05, Leon Ho <llch at redhat.com> wrote:
> Or if you have i18n.redhat.com account already, you can just create a fresh po
> files, and cvs add zh_HK.po.
> Then, the files will be automagically fetched by the status page [1].

Thanks, I already have an a/c.


> How many Hong Kong contributors you have invited at the moment? When your
> community is mature and is over five active members, we can also help to
> create a mailing list like fedora-trans-hk.

Thanks for the offer, though I have mixed feeling about this. There is an
existing mailing list for gnome in hong kong, and I'd want to reuse it for
the purpose of centralized admin (handling multiple lists is a real
headache). However, RH software maintainers may not know this and
reflexively send news/queries to fedora-trans-* lists.

But anyway, creating it first is better, let me see what should be done
next. The reason is that translation community for chinese is very weak
right now. I have no problem finding 5 members, but 5 ACTIVE members
is different thing -- there are less than 5 persons working actively on
gnome + kde summed up together, and that already includes people from
Taiwan and Hong Kong. I'm aiming at improving the situation, but that
needs a little time.


> That is translation part. Before you want to get started, let's think about on
> the i18n development part - I would like to pick some of the issues to you
> for discussion:

Yes, these are another set of questions that I want to discuss as well.


>  - How to organize language naming in applications such as anaconda. As you
> know currently zh_TW are regarded as Chinese (Traditional).

The best thing to do, is to use district name.  (yes, GEOGRAPHICAL district
name, not country or iso names, you know another riot from either taiwan or
mainland china would happen otherwise) That looks like:

zh_CN   Chinese (China)
zh_HK   Chinese (Hong Kong)
zh_SG   Chinese (Singapore)
zh_TW  Chinese (Taiwan)


>  - Translation fallback. If there are no translation in zh_HK, how to fall
> back to other locale? Using special case like LANGUAGE=zh_HK:zh_TW:zh is the
> last thing we want to do in Fedora.

Hm, FWIW, I never comprehend why $LANGUAGE is a bad thing, although
a few applications don't use $LANGUAGE (like poedit), and it's a GNU
extension. Put aside technical ideals, the reality is that, to make zh_HK
fully available for _ALL_ software packages (not only RH specific software),
it takes at least months, if not years. So during this transition period, solely
depending on $LC_MESSAGES would cause translation not shown at all, thus
discouraging translators to continue their work. That's even worse than
adding special case support in language switcher.

So setting $LANGUAGE is out of practical need, not because it's technically
worse/better. Within say, 1 yr or 1.5 yr, this $LANGUAGE can be dropped if
it's still undesirable.

Greetings,
Abel

>
> Regards,
> Leon
>
> [1]: http://i18n.redhat.com/cgi-bin/i18n-status
>
> On Wednesday 21 December 2005 10:35, Abel Cheung wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'd like to form a new translation team, as title. What procedure
> > should I follow? I do already have an a/c in elvis.redhat.com, but
> > haven't  been actively using it so far.
> >
> > Hong Kong has been using Taiwan translation for long time, but
> > since the cultural and language difference is becoming large, so
> > there is need to seperately handle them now, though the difference
> > can perhaps be easily managed by a simple script.
> >
> > But even after adding Hong Kong translations (language code is
> > zh_HK), most software should have configure.in/ac updated, or
> > to be precise, updating ALL_LINGUAS variable in configure.in/ac.
> > Is there any need to contact corresponding software maintainers
> > as well?
> >
> > Best,
> > Abel
> >
> > PS Leon Ho, are you here? If there is need then we can perhaps
> > discuss all these things...
> > --
> > Abel Cheung   (GPG Key: 0xC67186FF)
> > Key fingerprint: 671C C7AE EFB5 110C D6D1  41EE 4152 E1F1 C671 86FF
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------
> > * GNOME Hong Kong - http://www.gnome.hk/
> > * Opensource Application Knowledge Assoc. - http://oaka.org/
> >
> > --
> > Fedora-i18n-list mailing list
> > Fedora-i18n-list at redhat.com
> > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-i18n-list
>


--
Abel Cheung   (GPG Key: 0xC67186FF)
Key fingerprint: 671C C7AE EFB5 110C D6D1  41EE 4152 E1F1 C671 86FF
--------------------------------------------------------------------
* GNOME Hong Kong - http://www.gnome.hk/
* Opensource Application Knowledge Assoc. - http://oaka.org/