Re: Native Language Support

[Dennis Bjorklund <db at zigo dot dhs dot org>]

On 26 Jun 2001, Ole Laursen wrote:

> was simply snowed under with work I think. I don't know whether that's
> the reason the Swedish translation hasn't been through the project.

There where errors in gcc that prevented translations to work. The strings
were marked for translation, but when the gcc ran it did not use them.
So the translations on the fsf ftp site have never been used for anything
(at least what I know). A couple of weeks before the 3.0 release gcc was
fixed, but by then most of the strings have changed so the old
translations where of no use.

I've been working to translate the 3.0 release but it's a lot of strings
and I do have a job during the days (and more sometime) so the translation
have been a low priority, specially during the time where it could not
work in gcc anyway. Just wasted work to translate something that nobody
can use.

The reson I did not use the FSF ftp potfile to translate was simply that
it was not up to date. Still today the FSF potfile for gcc is over a year
old and there are the posibility of people out there trying to translate
it right now.

How and when the FSF potfile should be updated I don't know. Many
smaller projects have a string freeze some time before the release. With
the wast amount of strings that are in gcc, that period is probably going
to be too long for it to work good. In big projects like nautilus (it has
lots of strings) they simply view the po files as any other source-file
and it's updated against cvs. The translators can do a cvs update every
week, regenerate the pot file themself and update the .po file like any
other source file. When there are several translators (like nautilus) cvs
also gives all the usual advantages.

We still gets automaticly generated mail on the swedish translation teams
mailinglist saying that the potfile for gcc have not been translated. But
there is no way that I will translate that old file.

But i've hed this discussion before, and it's not a big deal. I will of
course send in my translation to FSF in the future when that works. But
for now there is nothing at FSF that is worth translating.

> I'm really glad to hear that people are working on the localization
> part. Thanks!

Ooh, me to. I run most of my program localized nowadays. Emacs is not
translated tough and I guess that is an even bigger problem with all of
it's lisp-code. But that's another mailinglist that i'm not subscribed to.

-- 
/Dennis