[lintian] Translation of tag descriptions

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Hi all,

A recent patch series to Lintian added support for translating the
description of Lintian tags.  Accordingly, I would like to request
translation for said tag descriptions.



The support is bolted on to a project that (to my knowledge) never had
translation support as a design feature, so the implementation may have
some rough edges.
  Unfortunately, I am not much of a translator, so I may need some help
figuring out which edges to smooth and how best to do that.  In
particular, I don't know what I can/cannot expect of the average
translator and feedback is very welcome.


In particular, I am hoping to achieve two things:
 * Help translators getting started
   - Please review the "Translating Lintian" section of the top level
     README and help me improve to make it easier to get started.
   - Please, let me know what I forgot to document/mention that
     translators would like to know.
 * Help translators review their (or others) work
   - We got some formatting / mark-up in some of the translations. There
     are automated checks for the mistakes we (i.e. the coders) make
     ourselves.  It is quite possible some of these checks should be
     extended to catch common translation mistakes.
   - Are there existing tools we can trivially run on the po-files to
     check them for common mistakes?


Note that Lintian has a tool (lintian-info) for showing tag
descriptions.  You can trivially request Lintian to show you the
translated tag description (see below for how) as others will see it (in
their terminal).
  The only cave-at is that said code as so far only been used for
English text (quite possibly only ASCII).  Should you spot some glitches
with it, please make sure to report them.


Finally, a note to people doing Danish translators: Feel free to discard
the existing work.  The da.po was mostly used for testing purposes and,
at the very least, needs a review.



The quick-start guide (assuming shell know-how):


Setup
    $ git clone \
      https://alioth.debian.org/anonscm/git/lintian/lintian.git
    $ cd lintian
    (optionally, have a look at the README)

Creating a new translation
    $ msginit -i po4a/po/checks/checks.pot -l $LANGUAGE \
      -o po4a/po/checks/$LANGUAGE.po

Editing an existing translation
    $ sensible-editor po4a/po/checks/$LANGUAGE.po
    (Assuming here that your sensible-editor has decent "po" support)

Checking/reviewing an existing translation
    $ debian/rules runtests-translation

    $ debian/rules update-po
    $ LC_ALL=$LANGUAGE frontend/lintian-info -t $TAG
    (Note this may give warnings from perl, if $LANGUAGE is not
     configured properly with perl.  This is mostly harmless and noisy).


Thanks for considering,
~Niels