country names translations (Was: need an idea for kxkb (multiple variants UI))

[Nicolas Goutte]

On Saturday 04 March 2006 19:19, Andriy Rysin wrote:
> David Faure wrote:
> > On Friday 03 March 2006 14:55, Andriy Rysin wrote:
> >> Nicolas Goutte wrote:
> >>> On Friday 03 March 2006 12:33, Nicolas Goutte wrote:
> >>>> On Thursday 02 March 2006 17:25, Andriy Rysin wrote:
> >>>>> hmm, that means to translate list of countries I need to load (and
> >>>>> parse) >200 files? Does not look like acceptable way to me :(
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Can anybody tell me if its hard to have things like Country name
> >>>>> translations in common *.po files so that we could reuse them with
> >>>>> simple insertCatalog() ???
> >>>>
> >>>> If you really must, you can use desktop_kdebase.po. But it would be
> >>>> the first time a desktop*.po module is called directly in KDE (as
> >>>> there were not meant for that).
> >>>
> >>> Sorry, I have realized that you cannot do that as desktop*.po files are
> >>> not packaged for the release.
> >>
> >> Yes, that's what I found, it's there but not in release. The question
> >> would be for core people if it's ok to include desktop_kdebase.po into
> >> release, should not be too hard unless there's architectural reasons not
> >> to do it?
> >
> > I see no problem with shipping that .po file as part of each language's
> > translations.
>
> ok, I've tried to use that and realized that in desktop_kdebase.po we
> have countries in the form of:
> #: l10n/be/entry.desktop:2
> msgid "Name=Belgium"
>
> while we need
> msgid "Belgium"
>
> I also found out that country names also used at least in kdepim, kivio,
> kspread, kgeography, kstars
>
> so the question would be whether it's possible to extract country
> translations from "Name=xxx" to "xxx" into some separate file a load it
> as additional catalogue, or shall we create separate file for
> translators? As this is potentially could be reused in several places I
> think we could spare some work by unifying country names (an possibly
> other common names) translations.

I do not think so.

If I remember well, I had written once that we should not do things now at the 
end of the lifetime of KDE3 that have not been done for the most of the 
lifetime of KDE3.

So the country names will continue to be throughout KDE and that will remain 
so (especially that Kivio and KSpread are KOffice applications and therefore 
should work on more than one recent KDE version.)

And for KDE4, exactly the future about this subject is very vague (see the 
discussion a few days agon on kde-i18n-doc about the "iso-names" Debian 
package (again a license problem)).

For KDE3, you surely can prepend "Name=" to the string and remove that name 
later after the translation is returned. (Qt3 can prepend a QString 
(QString::prepend) and remove a fixed length part of a QString 
(QString::remove).) (Note that this would not be KDE4-compatible.)

>
> Andriy

Have a nice day!