[GRASS5] another approach to i18n for tcltkgrass; former one revoked

[Alex Shevlakov]

--- Russell Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:
> Glynn Clements writes:
>  > Also, the generation of the translated scripts
> needs to be automatic. 

It can be made automatic, if a complicated software
like "Socratus Pro Win" was used. Although I'm really
not sure the quality of translation would be normal,
and I doubt people would like it. Perhaps you know a
better translation program (and free software).

>  > If a developer makes any changes to tcltkgrass,
> they shouldn't have to
>  > change multiple versions.
> 
> Yeah, the whole idea behind i18n is to separate out
> the code from
> the messages.  That way, the programmers can change
> the code in
> magical and mysterious ways without needing to
> interact with
> translators in any way.

If a developer changes code, she does not need to
contact translators.
It's generally translators mess to follow the code
changes. This is what I think NLS maintenance is.

  For example, the code can
> be recompiled, menu 
> entries moved around, or even translated from Tcl/Tk
> into C or Python
> or Perl, and the programmers never need to touch the
> translations.

Have you ever dealt with issues or just theoretizing?

> 
> I don't know if Tcl/Tk supports libintl in the
> current version.
> Switching to a version that does is much, much
> better than siccing
> translators on the tcltkgui source code.

It's free software.

BTW, it becomes clear if you look at menu.tcl (or any
module script), that there is no code in them. These
files are 95% messages, English or whatever. One of
the reasons why, in this particular case, I chose to
have these 212 tiny files instead of the one named
"ru.msg", is that sum of the disk space occupied would
be almost twice lower. This is because you need to
write each string twice (in both languages) in msgcat
loaded file, and only once in the chosen option. So
I've been also thinking about saving NLS translators
time, because I'm an NLS translator.

--alex

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