[rkward-devel] New French translation

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

On Friday 18 November 2011, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:
> I've just finished translating RKWard to French, attached is the
> resulting PO file. I hope that way I'll be able to suggest RKWard to
> French R users more easily.

thanks! I have just committed this to our repository. Should be imported to 
launchpad within a few days.
 
> The current French translation for RKWard was very bad, to the point I
> think it made more harm than good to have it: very few strings were
> translated, often with language mistakes and even a few incorrect
> translations. Maybe it would be a good idea to avoid shipping a PO file
> until it's known to be good enough: for having participated in the
> French translation of Ubuntu, I know Launchpad Translations is a very
> dangerous tool when no approved team checks for the quality of the
> translation. Often, people come up, translate a few strings without
> context in a very approximate way, and the aggregation of these random
> contributions makes up a very bad PO file. Probably, the KDE translation
> team, if willing to help, would really improve the situation - anyway,
> that's my piece of advice. ;-)

I don't feel terribly qualified in this area. I do see your point, and in fact, 
personally, I prefer an English desktop. One reason for that is that I tend to 
be unsatisfied with translation quality across the board.

Anyway, for RKWard, the vast majority of translations was provided by actual 
users of RKWard at some point of time, and in general I would think that's 
probably the best warrant that translations will be at least mostly ok. Of 
course, having a formal quality control would be much better - if we can get 
that.

Perhaps as an interim solution, we could work on the assumption that any 
translation which is very incomplete is not well-maintained, either. I.e. 
perhaps we would only install translations which are at least 80% complete or 
so.

Comments?

> Another area in which I'd be interested: is there any plan to allow
> translating plugins? Would the gettext support present in R packages be
> enough? Currently, the GUI is half-untranslated even with a full PO file
> for the main app, which feels a little weird.

Overall, this would be feasible to add, and of course, it should be added, 
eventually. The translations would actually happen in the frontend, but that's 
merely a detail. The biggest challenge will be creating a suitable .pot file. 
In particular:
- Translatable strings need to be extracted for the plugin .xml, .rkh, and .js 
files (for the .js files, translatable strings would need to be marked up by the 
plugin developer; for the other two, it's implicit).
- In particular for the .xml-files, it will be essential to include enough 
context in the extracted strings to enable an adequate translation. Strings 
there are often very short fragments.
- Probably, one .pot file should be created per .pluginmap.

If you can provide (parts of) a solution for this, then I can probably take 
care of implementing message lookup in the GUI within a relatively short 
amount of time.

> I've also made a rather big list of small improvements to the original
> strings, I'll try to post them as patches or suggestions.

Great!

Thomas
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