[bt-devel] Translation & PO files

[Fred Saalbach]

Martin - You can pass this on to translators that do not monitor the
mail list.

Just a reminder

To make the .po file method of translating really useful, when making a
translation from one version to another, use the rough translation
features of kbable.

If there is a .po file from a previous translation to your target
language import it into your kbable translation database.  If you then
run automatic translation on the english .po file the result will be a
'rough translation' of the target language.  Kbable attempts to identify
everything that has an exact match in the translation database. 

If there is no previous translation for which the .po files can be found
you can make a translation database from the files at 
http://i18n.kde.org/translation_archive/ .  Unpack this and have kbable
settings>configure>translationdatabase
   "database tab"
  "scan directories and subdirectories" button
This will create a large enough database to fill in a significant
portion of many target language po files.

Much information about the workings of the translation process (using
the .po files to create XML text) can be found at
http://i18n.kde.org/translation-howto/index.html

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If translators - or anyone else have comments on the documents, please
speak up.
  
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Martin
Please consider save the .po files on the sourceforge.cvs indexed by
release number so they will be easily access by translators.  If we
depend on the main CVS doing this, and translators save .po files to the
cvs after i start making changes to the english text, there will be some
problems with mismatches between the target language.po files and the
english file (which provides the formatting xml tags when the target
language XML file is produced).  We could use the method used by i18n
packing all of the .po files into a bt-translation-de.bz2 archive - one
for each target language.  I don't think that saving the resulting xml
files here would be needed as these can be extracted from the tar ball.

Fred Saalbach