Re: How to easy the translation process

Giuseppe Sacco a écrit :
> as a translator I find quite uncomfortable some part of the pgadmin3 release process. I would like to discuss if others share these problems, and eventually fix them.
>
> The first problem is related to the stringmerge utility. Every time source code is updated, with changes in strings, a manual invocation of stringmerge is required. It happens that people forget it, so I have to use stringmerge every time I need to update my translation.
> I think that merging strings could be done automatically via Makefile, at build time.

Our current process is to update the strings when we think strings won't
change much before release.

I don't understand in which way stringmerge is related with your build
process. Using make allows you to build the "new" pgadmin and that
allows you to run it to check your translation. At this time, you should
have already translated your .po file and using stringmerge won't help you.

But I would understand that you would like it to build pgadmin3.mo if
your tool doesn't build it.

> Updating all translations on SVN, as the current stringmerge does, is useless since it just add a lot of SVN changes and commit for files that still have to be translated.

stringmerge help us to have statistics on the web page because it
commits merge po files on SVN. Statistics help translators to understand
if they still have a lot of work to do.

> Another problem with the build process is that when I change my pgadmin3.po, it is not automatically compiled to .mo. This is another step that could be done automatically in i18n/Makefile.

I kind of agree on this one. If you want to check your translation
before sending it to me, you need to build the .mo with msgfmt or
another tool. We can tell the Makefile to build every .mo file which is
not updated.

> I also feel a need for a string freeze period before any release. I am used to update my translations on other projects while developers do not change strings. Without a string freeze is very difficult to keep translations update and in sync.

We use feature freeze as our string freeze. They aren't totally frozen,
they can change but we do our best not to.

> Last problem. The po file includes all strings alphabetically sorted. I find very handy to have these strings not sorted; what I would need is it to keep closer strings that are next in the source code. The reason is that very often strings are related the same subject and should be translated using the same words.

I understand your problem but I don't see them sorted. They seem to be
sorted by source file but when one string is available on two or more
source files, they can't be at different places on the .po file.

I would like to know what other translators think about these issues.

Regards.

--
Guillaume.
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