[Davical-dev] [DAViCal-general] Question about internationalization

[Andrew McMillan]

On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 16:40 +0200, Matthias Mohr wrote: 
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> there are a lot of strings in the GUI which are still not translated - or to clarify things,
> sometimes they have a proper translation in the .po file, but it still does not get translated.
> 
> So I tried to find out what's going on - and don't understand it.
> 
> I added a line in the translate function which prints out a debug message when the translated string is the same as the input 
> string:
> (Translation.php, line 66ff):
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>   function translate( $en ) {
>     $xl = gettext($en);
>     dbg_error_log("I18N","Translated =%s= into =%s=", $en, $xl );
>     if ( strcmp($xl, $en) == 0 ) {
>       $curlocale = setlocale( LC_ALL, 0 );
>       dbg_error_log("I18N","Translation of =%s= not available (locale=%s)!", $en, $curlocale );
>     }
>     return $xl;
>   }
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> BTW, when I try to print out "$c->current_locale" instead of the return value of "setlocale" above,
> it always prints an empty string.
> Why? awl_set_locale (which sets that variable) has been called???

For that to work you need to add:
  globals $c;
at the start of the function :-)


> After adding the above lines I identified a lot of strings which apparently seems to miss translation.
> I picked up one string ("User Name") which is often used and does not get translated.
> I then looked at "de.po" (which is used in my case) for the msgid and found the following:
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> #~ msgid "User Name"
> #~ msgstr "Benutzername"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> So as you can see, the translation is present, but commented out.
> Then I decided to remove the "#~ " at the beginning of that line to uncomment the lines.
> 
> After that I run a "make built-po" in the base directory.
> When I open the de.po after that call, the above two lines are commented out again!
> Why?

The de.po file is merged from the po/messages.pot which is in turn built
from the po/strings.raw file.  This process is done by the scripts in
scripts/po which parse the source code looking for strings that will
need translating (i.e. scripts/po/extract.pl) to write strings.raw and
then various gettext tools build the po/messages.pot file from this.

It's all scripted by scripts/po/rebuild-translations.sh and there may
well be some flaw in the process.


> What am I missing? Is the make call mentioned aboce correct?
> Could you please explain the whole translation mechanism a bit?

Supposedly this is all standard gettext stuff, but while I felt
user-interface translation was an important thing to have in DAViCal, it
(inevitably) isn't important to the primary developer...

I would love it if you can review the process and find out what, if
anything, is going wrong.


> BTW, the output of the above debug lines is absolutely confusing - it tries to translate all my usernames and other stuff (e.g. 
> already translated strings).
> I'm sure there's potential for further improvements ;-)

I'm sure there is too.  Lots :-)

I only natively speak English.  While I spoke some French as a kid, and
some German as a university student those days are long behind me and I
remember little of them.  Currently the best I can muster for a second
language is a smattering of traveller's Spanish - enough to order food,
accommodation and travel, but still not enough to hold a conversation.
These give me a small understanding of the problems of translation, but
I'd be happy to be more educated.

Cheers,
					Andrew.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
andrew (AT) morphoss (DOT) com                            +64(272)DEBIAN
Q: What do they call the alphabet in Arkansas?
A: The impossible dream. 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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