[RFC] Future of Qt translations in KDE4

[Nicolas Goutte]

On Monday 21 August 2006 21:50, Nicolas Goutte wrote:
> Currently for KDE4 (in tradition of KDE3), mosts of Qt's translatable
> messages are extracted (manually) for KDE and put by Scripty into the
> translation template kdelibs.pot, so that the translators can translate
> those messages in their respective kdelibs.po translation file (which is
> then compile in the respective binary (GNU MO) format kdelibs.gmo).
>
> On the other side, Qt4 (as Qt3 does too) expects the translation in the Qt
> Linguist format and its respective binary format (which is of course not
> GNU MO). In Qt4's source, there are a few translations, however in much
> less languages than KDE has languages.
>
> Therefore we have currently an hybrid situation: Qt expects its translation
> in its format but when KDE needs translation from a message from Qt it gets
> it from its own translation.
>
> So the question is how we are do it in KDE4?
>
> A few possible solutions:
> - we force Qt's format and point translators to Trolltech for
> not-yet-existing translations. (This is not a translator-friendly
> situation).
> - we force Qt's format, however KDE translators can add a translation file
> for Qt in Qt format inside KDE in case the language is not supported by
> KDE. (Question: how KDE compiles this file into binary format. How is Qt
> going to find that file?)

> - we use a hook in Qt to force translations in KDE's format. Question:does
> Qt support such a thing? Probably not!

Looking further, I have found that for a KApplication, it is exactly what we 
have. (So Qt support this!)

So the question is more now: do we continue on this way?
Yes, if yes, then we should probably split the Qt translations from 
kdelibs.po(t), mainly to allow automated conversion from Qt Linguist files 
and also to be able to improve the situation of copyright and license of the 
translation which might be different than from the rest of kdelibs.po. 
(Trolltech versus KDE teams, Qt's GPL/QPL/Trolltech license versus kdelibs' 
LGPL (mainly). I would propose kdeqt.po(t) as file name for this new file.

> - we keep the current hybrid situation, with risk of untranslated messages
> for language not supported in Qt4's source.
>
> Notes:
> - KBabel is supposed to support editing Qt Linguist files. However it was
> probably not tested in reality.
> - Also other PO file editor have no Qt Linguist mode and therefore
> translators using such editors would need to use the original Qt Linguist
> to translate a Qt Linguist file.
>
> Have a nice day!
Have a nice day!