[cups.development] Templates and translations

Carles Pina i Estany carles at pina.cat
Sun May 22 11:36:30 PDT 2011


Hi,

On May/22/2011, Mike Sweet wrote:
> The primary reason we don't translate using a normal message catalog
> is that things like layout need more than just translation of strings.
> For example, the jobs list needs to read right to left for some
> languages which would require localization of that HTML or some
> extensive changes to the HTML templating code to handle layout
> direction and other localization issues.

one way to workaround the limitiation would be to have the templates for
left-right languages and other ones for right-left languages.

> Also, by localizing HTML fragments in files a local site can more
> easily customize the web interface without code changes.

And if there are changes in the English template it's quite difficult to
propagate to all the other languages (changes in the template-part of
the strings).

> All in all I think the current system has served us well and we
> haven't seen a disproportionate number of errors compared to the po
> files. In fact, I see more errors in the po files, thus the "checkpo"
> program. (it would be nice to also have a checktmpl program, although
> I'm not sure how much work that would be...)

It's strange :-) I'm reviewing some templates for the Catalan
translation, and I find quite difficult to read the translated
sentences, then match with the original English (to see that the meaning
is the same). Also the translator needs to see if some text needs to be
translated or doesn't need to be translated (it's a string facing the
user or an internal label).

And thinking about changes in the English texts makes me nervous :-)

Not sure if other translators has had other experiences.

I also understand that CUPS is a mature project, and would be difficult
to do the migration. And I guess that the templates are not changing
often.

I'll do an easy Python script to avoid some mistakes in our translation,
if I see something interesting in other translations I'll share here.

-- 
Carles Pina i Estany
	http://pinux.info





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