Rowan Collins wrote:
On 28/08/05, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
Maybe it would be possible to make a list of strings which are expected to be customised, and which are not. For example, "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" will always be customised while "Article", "Discussion", "Edit", "Recent Changes"... will never be. Then, LanguageXx.php could periodically be refreshed with only "safe" strings filled in. Language files for Navajo and other languages which only have translations in MediaWiki namespace could be created from scratch in this way.
Nice idea, but I'm not sure such a distinction can really be made - projects may have all sorts of reason for inserting particular jargon, links, or just plain style in various parts of the interface, and it seems a shame to deny them the right to do this. In fact, MediaWiki:edit is a case in point - the English default is "edit", but the English Wikipedia uses "edit this page", because lots of descriptions elsewhere refer to "clicking the edit this page link".
I think a better idea would be to have a collaborative tool for translations (be it wiki-style or anything else) which was able to compare current default messages with custom messages from a particular wiki, and allow users (who can understand the language in question) to manually "merge" the changes which are appropriate for the distributed default. Ideally, there should also be a way of flagging which messages have been changed in the English "master" version and/or a way of comparing with a "parent" language (so, for instance, Catalan might be worth comparing against both Castillian Spanish and English).
I haven't time right now to see if any existing tools could be adapted for this purpose - tempting though a wiki-based system seems, a permissive setup of an existing l10n tool might be more suitable.
Again: OmegaT (and if possible also other tools) will be integrated in UW (we are already talking about the reference implementation) - we can have a tmx management at a certain stage - please base this stuff on TMX since this means almost all localisation tools on Lista-Standard can be used for localisation (also commercial tools like DéjàVu - http://www.altril.com - but of course I prefer Open Source tools) - so please have a look at this and send me sample files to try out what the actual OmegaT-version does and what needs to be changed (I suppose it is fairly easy to adapt the file parser).
In a tmx it is not said that the source and target must be 100% the same text - it can also be a "basic contents" - "special contents" thingie. Really it is hard to explain this.
let's say in source you have "abc" in English and in target you have "abc" + further text that is wanted by the local project in Italian
whenever there is a new version to translate the sofware will then give you the inserted translation pair source/target as 100% match or if wording was slightly changed as partial match.
is that understandable? If not please tell me - so I will try to explain better. It is just like we sometimes find it in "Allmessages"
For further info on OmegaT: http://www.omegat.org/omegat/omegat.html
For further info on tmx + tbx: http://www.lisa.org
I know that this is not the ordinary wiki-tool and I know that it might seem strange to whoever is not a translator used to CAT-Tools, but it really is a great tool built for localisation/translation work.
Ciao, Sabine
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