[kde-edu]: kturtle's future take on tranlations

[cies]

i forward this message also to these lists...
when replying, please CC me in!
thanks.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: cies <cies.breijs at gmail.com>
Date: Sep 26, 2006 8:57 AM
Subject: kturtle's future take on tranlations
To: Anne-Marie Mahfouf <annemarie.mahfouf at free.fr>
Cc: kdeedu-kturtle at googlegroups.com


I want to make the translation process of KTurtle as easy as possible,
resulting in KTurtle beeing translated in more languages.

for the KDE 3.x version of KTurtle the translating process was quite
straining: you had to translate the GUI strings, the manual, the
commands, the syntax highlighting theme, and the examples.

in the current version of KTurtle translating the syntax highlighting
theme is no longer needed (thanks to reusing the interpreter's
tokenizer for highlighting). the GUI strings and the manual will
always have to be translated, so these steps cant be simplyfied.

so the only two steps that allow improvement are:
 - the commands, and
 - the examples

right now the commands are stored in a simple dictionary-ish xml file.
the examples are just a bunch of kturlte programs (text files), when
the commands are already translated the examples can partly be
translated by a perl script (string replacing the commands), the rest
(the strings, symbols, comments and the filename) has to be done
manually.
these files have to be stored in the "data" directory of a
translation. for instance here:
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/l10n/nl/data/kdeedu/kturtle/

is this still the way to go? requesting all the translation teams to
go through a bunch of text files?

well, when not using text files one could use the i18n framework of
KDE to store all the commands and examples as strings... this would
have one major disadvantage: that it is more difficult to add
commands/examples in another language apart from the whole
translations package of that language.

we could also facilitate the translation efford by having a (web) app
that helps to translate examples. there could be example templates,
and based on some values the template is filled with the appropriate
names.

right now i want to make a good descision on this matter, so i'm
investigating all possible options.

main questions:
 - what are the pro's/con's of putting the commands and the examples
in the i18n framework
 - what more can we do to make translating kturlte as easy and
straightforward possible.


cies breijs.








--
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as
kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic
pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." -- Kristian
Wilson (Nintendo, Inc), 1989


-- 
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as
kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic
pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." -- Kristian
Wilson (Nintendo, Inc), 1989