It's great to know gettext can already do this: it means we can start
testing the process.
This facility is needed for the cases when translating from a non-
English language _would_ produce a better result.
For my language alone, there are many possible translators who would
work much better from Chinese or Russian to Vietnamese than from
English. It's simply a matter of which languages you have had the
opportunity to learn.
Now _that_ is an interesting idea!
Gettext can already nearly do this, too,
if you write three small scripts/
programs to
- convert an English-based .pot file into a Russian-based .pot file,
- convert an English->Vietnamese PO file to a Russian->Vietnamese
PO file,
(to be used when such a translator starts her work),
- convert an Russian->Vietnamese PO file back to an English-
>Vietnamese PO file
(to be used when a translator is done with her work).
And then the translator has these additional conversions steps all
the time.
It would be better, for the future, that the translator has only one
additional step to perform: When she gets a new PO file, she
converts it
to a mixed English/Russian->Vietnamese PO file. Such a mixed
English/Russian->Vietnamese PO file would
1) permit the translator to peek into the English original when
something is
unclear,
2) also work when not some of the Russian translations are
missing or fuzzy,
3) get rid of the "convert back" step, since msgfmt could
directly grok
the mixed English/Russian->Vietnamese PO file.
The syntax for a mixed PO file could like this:
msgid "Hello, world!"
msgid[ru] "Здравствуй, мир!"
msgstr "Chào thế giới !"
The PO file editors would have to be taught to display msgid[ru] in
preference
to msgid if the translator has said so.