[Caminol10n] Localization Application

[J.J. Enser]

Le Jun 28, 2007 à 8:44 PM, Smokey Ardisson a écrit :

> At 12:33 AM +0200 on 6/28/07, Marcello Testi wrote:
>
>> Il giorno 27/giu/07, alle 22:42, Martin 'MMx' Creutziger ha scritto:
>>
>>> Before you reinvent the wheel here, have you taken a look at the
>>> "L20n" concept
>>> Axel Hecht AKA Pike presented as a possible future l10n solution  
>>> for Mozilla
>>> products? Maybe it is usable for Camino, too.
>>
>> I've just looked around for the first time at the l20n thing and I
>> think it addresses quite different needs than those explained by
>> Tobias: while L20n aims at bringing more efficiency making the
>> translations less linguistically "dumb", the trouble we face here
>> has two sides, both with little to do with grammar and vocabulary.
>> 1) a tool that must be reliable in identifying and extracting all
>> untranslated strings in the application so they can be translated
>> without wandering through interface bits
>
> Perhaps JJ has an update on the status of Apple releasing a
> non-broken version of AppleGlot?

Ha ha, I know that was coming. I keep reminding the tools team that  
our beloved international developers community is struggling with the  
current version of AppleGlot, and they're well aware of the issues  
and are working hard on getting something out for you guys... Please  
keep in mind that any public release requires more testing and  
blessing than internal builds, and by several teams (internal  
localization engineering, technical publications, developer  
relations, adc web site, etc.). Yes, I know, at mozilla.org, pushing  
bits out to the world was a lot simpler...
Anyway, I'm sure you'll all agree that a good quality release with  
more bug fixes is worth the wait.

I'm tempted to say that AppleGlot has been delayed because of the  
effort and the focus Apple has put in the iPhone for the past few  
months, but that would not be exactly true :-)  What's true however,  
is that several Leopard related issues have delayed further the  
release of a reliable and "durable" AppleGlot update, but we're  
getting there and you'll be happy with the outcome Really Soon Now™.

I'll be announcing it right here when it becomes available.

This said, if you're looking at other localization solutions or even  
build your own, besides all the good ideas from smokey, you may want  
to consider one that integrates a good translation memory or glossary  
management system. This comes very useful to help keep terminology  
consistent across updates, languages and platforms, and to minimize  
the amount of new translation required for each update. In a perfect  
world, this service would be multilingual and community maintained  
(web interface)...
Dreams bring hope, hope keeps you alive :-)

-- jj.

>
>> 2) a way to distribute the work among l10n teams while keeping all
>> together chronologically
>
> What did come to mind when MMx mentioned Axel's work is the
> compare-locales script
> <http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/testing/tests/l10n/scripts/ 
> compare-locales>
> It's not usable at all for us (since it works on Mozilla jars and
> their dtd and properties files), but long-term it would be useful to
> have an equivalent tool for Camino.
>
> My thoughts are it would do something like this:
>
> 1) Invoke whatever command-line magic AppleGlot uses on the files in
> Resources/localized/*.lproj and PreferencePanes/*/Resources/*.lproj
> to produce all the individual temporary .strings files
> 2) Compare these (plus the actual .strings files, and the ReadMe and
> Release Notes) from the English.lproj with a given localization
> 3) Report on untranslated strings (strings whose text is equivalent
> to the English string) and "missing" strings (strings present in the
> English version but missing from a localization, meaning that a nib
> or .strings file is out-of-date in a localization) and untranslated
> lines (paragraphs) in the ReadMe and RTF.
> 4) Repeat with every other localization
> 5) Publish results to the web
>
> The prerequisites (besides a good hacker to write the script) are
> landing the localizations in *some sort* of VCS (not necessarily
> cvs.mozilla.org) and then a Mac to run the tool on a regular basis,
> pulling English files either from cvs.m.o or from the latest nightly,
> and localizations from the localizations VCS, running the tests, and
> then posting some results to the web.
>
> Anyway, just an idea for discussion.  There are several hurdles
> there, but if people like the direction (or come up with better
> ideas), it might be something for some of the caminol10n community to
> work on while development of Camino 1.6 is underway and not yet ready
> for substantial localization work.
>
> (Another idea, to solve a different problem, is to simply create a
> list of all the files that get localized, and have a script poll
> cvs.m.o or bonsai.m.o periodically to see if any have changed, which
> could do the simple task of alerting everyone when we change a
> localizable file without any human communication required.)
>
> Smokey
> -- 
> Smokey Ardisson
> Co-Lead
> Triage/QA and Website & Documentation
> The Camino Project
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