Developers' reference - improvable section on l10n
Hi,
reviewing the paragraph on "Internationalization and Translations"
in the ongoing German translation of the developers' guide I found
sections I consider outdated or improvable.
I'm glad to gather contributions and to prepare a patch from them.
Cheers
Martin
****************************************************************************
According to Introduction to i18n
<http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/> from Tomohiro KUBOTA,
I18N (internationalization) means modification of a software or related
technologies so that a software can potentially handle multiple
languages, customs, and so on in the world, while L10N (localization)
means implementation of a specific language for an already
internationalized software.
That's one paragraph and quite a long sentence.
l10n and i18n are interconnected, but the difficulties related to each
of them are very different. It's not really difficult to allow a program
to change the language in which texts are displayed based on user
settings, but it is very time consuming to actually translate these
messages. On the other hand, setting the character encoding is trivial,
but adapting the code to use several character encodings is a really
hard problem.
How about
s/but the difficulties related to each of them are very different./
/but have very different problems./
8.1. How translations are handled within Debian
For program messages, the gettext infrastructure is used most of the
time. Most of the time, the translation is handled upstream within
projects like the Free Translation Project
<http://translationproject.org/>, the Gnome translation Project
<http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject> or the KDE one
<http://i18n.kde.org/>. The only centralized resource within Debian is
the Central Debian translation statistics
<http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/>, where you can find some statistics
about the translation files found in the actual packages, but no real
infrastructure to ease the translation process.
I think it does not yet reflect pages like
http://www.debian.org/international/l10n/po/. There the translator
can easily get input without downloading the whole source code.
An effort to translate the package descriptions started long ago, even
if very little support is offered by the tools to actually use them
(i.e., only APT can use them, when configured correctly). Maintainers
don't need to do anything special to support translated package
descriptions; translators should use the Debian Description Translation
Project (DDTP) <http://ddtp.debian.net/>.
Is "(i.e., only APT can use them, when configured correctly)." still
valid? It would be helpful to ask the maintainers to provide initial
versions for their mother tongue. Recently there have been two dozen
science descriptions pulled in for the German team - mostly about
numerical problems. They are quite difficult to translate. And then
a volunteer who does not understand what integrating a differential
equation means ...
For |debconf| templates, maintainers should use the |po-debconf| package
to ease the work of translators, who could use the DDTP to do their work
(but the French and Brazilian teams don't). Some statistics can be found
both on the DDTP site <http://ddtp.debian.net/> (about what is actually
translated), and on the Central Debian translation statistics
<http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/> site (about what is integrated in the
packages).
I think it's clearly outdated. Translators translate po files as
long as I can think (at least for one and a half years).
For package-specific documentation (man pages, info documents, other
formats), almost everything remains to be done.
I think mentioning po4a would not harm. E. g. currently the
manpages-de package is worked on using po4a.
There is an effort to handle Debian-specific man pages within a specific
VCS repository <http://cvs.debian.org/manpages/?cvsroot=debian-doc>.
I suggest mentioning http://www.debian.org/international/l10n/po4a/.
8.2.1. How to get a given text translated
To translate package descriptions or |debconf| templates, you have
nothing to do; the DDTP infrastructure will dispatch the material to
translate to volunteers with no need for interaction from your part.
Debconf templates are wrong. As above, the maintainers initial
version for it's mother tongue would narrow the burden of the
translation teams.
For all other material (gettext files, man pages, or other
documentation), the best solution is to put your text somewhere on the
Internet, and ask on debian-i18n for a translation in different
languages. Some translation team members are subscribed to this list,
and they will take care of the translation and of the reviewing process.
Once they are done, you will get your translated document from them in
your mailbox.
This does not explicitly mention the practice of sending templates
pot files to the language teams and asking for translation.
Reply to: