[FOSS-GPS] FoxtrotGPS: Call for translations!

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Sander van Grieken <sander at 3v8.net> writes:
>
> On Thursday 22 April 2010 11:18:32 Gabriele Colosimo wrote:
> > 
> > Thank you for your help and suggestion of the poedit software.
> > In fact I was wondering where to start, I mean:
> > 
> > - After getting the software, from where should I start with the
> > translation?
> 
> You need to get the source package, not just the compiled
> package. Extract the source package somewhere, then start poedit,
> select 'new catalog from POT' and navigate to where you extracted
> the source, and find the .pot file in the source tree. You can also
> open the other language files (.po) to see what has been and how it
> is translated.

Since we haven't had a release of foxtrotGPS yet, you'll actually need
to get the source from our Bazaar archive; actually, it would be
better anway to do translations of the in-development stuff between
releases than stuff that's already been released--while it's possible
to do a translation based on the contents of a release after the
release, `after release' is also basically `too late' in many
respects.

In any case, you'll need to have the prerequisites installed
for building the program from source (see the website
<http://www.foxtrotgps.org>), so that you can run the program
and see what it looks like when running with your translation.

Before you run through those build-instructions, you should edit the
`configure.in' file, find the line starting with "ALL_LINGUAS=", and
add the abbreviated name for your language to that list
(the abbreviated name for Italian is "it").

Beyond the more general `build' instructions on the website, there are
a couple of commands that you'll need to run after the `./configure' step:

    cd po
    make foxtrotgps.pot


That will generate an up-to-date "foxtrotgps.pot" file, which is a
translation-template that has all of the English words and phrases
alongside empty spaces for your translated text.

For Italian, foxtrotgps.pot should be renamed to "it.po".

After you've done that, you can have bzr save your progress:

    bzr add po/it.po
    bzr commit


> > - Will my translation be checked from anyone else?
> 
> probably, you never know with open source software :)

I certainly hope that adding new translations will allow us to reach
out and connect with people whom we would be less likely to reach with
English-only app; if we succeed in that, there should be more people
in the posisiton to `debug' translations--to let us know when a phrase
doesn't seem right to them.


> > - Am I the first in translating from English to Italian or I can see other
> > translations in order to keep the language closer as possible with previous
> > releases?
> 
> You're the first, there's no italian translation for foxtrotGPS yet.

I think that one of the reasons that Timo posted about wanting to use
Launchpad for translation is basically that Launchpad provides some
infrastructure for showing different ways that people have translated
common phrases before. I gather that a big part of this is that
launchpad.net is able to maintain a unified database of translations
built by data-mining *all* of the projects that use it.
While many of the exact phrases in foxtrotGPS have never been
translated to Italian in their entirety, some of the `fragments'
(like "OK" and "Cancel", or "POI" :)) may have been translated
by people working on other projects.

I'm fairly new to translation myself, and I'm unfamiliar with
Launchpad's translation-GUI and many of the other tools available to
translators, but I'm interested in hearing about what people more
versed in these things have seen or used and would recommend.

I'd prefer to avoid conversation-topics like `does anyone have
anything *against* Launchpad', and would rather hear what specific
*benefits* it (and other sites!) can offer and what (if any) drawbacks
there are. From what I've seen of it so far, `Launchpad Translations'
<http://translations.launchpad.net/> has my interest, but I need to
hear from people who know more about it than I do.

Probably one of the first questions that I should ask is: does an
entire project need to have a `launchpad project' registered in order
for people to use Launchpad do do translations, or do the translators
merely need accounts (like how developers can use `personal branches'
to host their bzr branches without needing `project membership')?
The model of `suck the whole project into a forge and just have
everyone use the forge' is not something that I'm comfortable with
right now.

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."