i18n to CJK status (was: Nice changes to po-debconf translation status pages)
On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 09:17:27PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
> (2003/09/11 17:48)
>
> >IMHO, translating debconf templates (which *are* user interaction
> >stuff) should have more priority than translating package descriptions
> >(which are currently used only very partially)...
>
> I agree.
>
> Howver, when I speak about priority, I have to mention about Mojibake.
> It is more important to ensure that Mojibake never occur.
>
> To tell the truth, I don't like translating very basic packages into
> Japanese, because very basic softwares must work very reliably while
> Japanese-displaying environment is not always available. Though there
> are special softwares (such as kon and jfbterm) which enables
> displaying Japanese characters on console, I think I cannot hope Linux
> console itself will have Japanese-displaying ability in several years.
> Since core people in Linux and XFree86 are mainly European-language
> speakers, they tend to think Japanese font is too large to be supported.
But debconf works now ok for CJK, doesn't it? Mojibake should now be avoided
in that system, or did I miss something?
Naturally, it's discutable to translate to japaneese the templates of
packages providing programs which are useless for japaneese speaking people
because of Mojibake or other issues.
> At Wed, 10 Sep 2003 15:25:25 +0200,
> Martin Quinson wrote:
> > Have a look at
> > http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/ja
> > Japaneese is only 17% translated in that area. 664 strings are translated
> > (from 3820). This page also repports that you personnaly translated 4
> > templates which are now not up to date anymore (alsa-driver, apt-build,
> > base-config and debconf)...
>
> Please don't compare the translation rate of 8bit languages and
> multibyte languages from the same viewpoint.
I am sorry, I was not trying to compare anything here. Really sorry if my
wording was offensive to anyone. It was not intended at all. I only wanted
to point out that if a japaneese translator were looking for something to
translate without issues dues to bad i18n, he could have a look at the
po-debconf messages.
But I may overestimate the quality of po-debconf for japaneese. What is the
situation on that point? Your page about mojibake seems to say that the
situation is solved since debconf 1.3, from 2 months ago.
That is why I do not share your pessimism about the future ability of the
kernel and XFree86 to support your language. It will take time, but look at
the debconf example. We managed to gain a well i18ned interface. It took
much time, and the efforts of Denis to clean up the i18n concerning the
translation maintainance issues, and yours to clean up the displaying issues
of non latin languages, but we did manage it, didn't we?
When I look at your page, I see that most window manager can handle
non-latin alphabet. Mainly, only enlightment fails that, and you have to
apply a patch to FVWM and FVWM95. What is the current situation on those
points? Did those patches get integrated? Did the enlightment situation
improve? What is the situation for metacity and the kde window manager?
Is there anything I can do to help those point improving? Mainly, who do I
have to send mails to cry for support?
What is the version number of the first xterm you are speaking about on
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/mojibake/terminal-emulators.html ?
I mean, you say that xterm does not work, and then you say that xterm 4.0
works. That's a bit misleading, isn't it ?
I have a question for you, the best expert in CJK I know. What do you think
of pango(www.pango.org)? It looks to me like a very well thought rendering
library, not only suited to CJK, but also to bidi and a whole bunch of
issues I am little aware of. From the package dependencies, it depends
mainly on glib (which is not that big) and a whole bunch of font rendering
tools. So, what prevents its use in a console emulator? In fact,
gnome-terminal and libzvt depend on pango, so I guess it's already done.
In short, my question is the following: What issue which could prevent pango
from being the solution to all mojibake did I oversee ?
Thanks, Mt.
--
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes.
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