From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_haxx.se>
Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2002 15:56:56 +0200 (MET DST)

On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Uwe Freese wrote:

> Here are my suggestions:
>
> *** No original strings:
> I think the IDs should be more or less self-explaining, so we can live
> without the "original string".

We can, but I don't think that is a good approach. It makes it harder for
people to write translations.

I want to make it as easy as possible for the translators.

> And there will be a english language file shipped with rockbox, so the user
> who wants to make a new language file can look into it and see how the
> english text is.

I disagree. I want to be able to mail *one* file to my polish friend, *one*
file to my greek friend and *one* file to my russian friend. They deliver
diffs back, I apply them.

> So I suggest not to add this "original text" in all the other language
> files. Also we would have to change ALL language files if a "original"
> string changes to make it consistent.

But we will add strings to the english one every now and yes we will have
tools that add those new strings to the localized language-files. That won't
be very hard nor complicated.

The upside of such an approach is that there is only one file used as input
for the languagefile2sourcecode script. That single file I mail my italian
friend is the only file he needs to generate source code with to build his
system with his translation.

I'll happily write the tools for all this if necessary.

> *** No DESC:
> Also if the files are named with the language, we can live without the
> DESC: line. I suggest LANGUAGE.lang files in a /language folder.

The DESC is a description of the specific translated word/phrase or possibly
in which context it is being used.

That will be very hard to live up to. The explanation/comment is there for
translators but even english users to know in which context the word is used,
as words might have several meanings and those may not be easily
interchangable in non-english languages. You can't possibly put that
explanation in the ID.

> The parser that creates the files for compilation should then identify the
> first word (without spaces) as the ID and the rest (from the next non-space
> character on to the end) as the text. So the user can adjust the text with
> spaces and/or tabs.

My described system is also open for further modifications of the format, as
we might need to introduce "maximum string length" for specific strings etc
in the future.

-- 
Daniel "Bagder" Stenberg -- http://rockbox.haxx.se/

Received on 2002-09-03