kde 3.3 translation engine

[Diego Iastrubni <elcuco at kdemail dot net>]

Hi people,

I am cross-posting this to kde-il and arabeyes-doc so be carefull when you 
post, otherwise only one side will get the message.

KDE 3.3 is about to be released, and with it a new translation engine. The 
idea is that if you don't have a string in your language this string will be 
in the next language in a list.

Lets assume you have a word "foo", and the list of languages is 
"aaa" -> "bbb" -> "ccc".

The new translation engine will look "foo" in the translation of "aaa" and if 
not found it will look for it in "bbb", and so on until it finds a 
translation to "foo".

This is ok, but it has a bad assumption:
sometimes the original language will not have a translation for every 
application, and when it does not, you still find that your application has 
some translated strings anyway. This is because each application gets the 
strings from several po-files. Some are part of kdelibs.

This leads to an application with mostly English UI and which is mirrored 
(since it uses translations from kdelibs.po). 

My suggestion is:
use the kdelibs.po translation of the first language which has translation for 
the original app.

In our example,
lets assume the app ("foo_app") is translated into "bbb" and not "aaa". I 
expect it to use the kdelibs.po for "bbb" and not "bbb". Then each word it 
should be tested in "bbb" then "ccc" (instead of "aaa" then "bbb" then 
"ccc").

I have raised this issue in kde-i18n-doc:
http://lists.kde.org/?t=109006230200001&r=1&w=2
http://lists.kde.org/?t=108983971800003&r=1&w=2

(those 2 threads are the same, someone uses a German porefix for replied mails 
and it confused the archives)

I hope that I made the problem clear. 
I am asking the Arabeyes team, since I need a new perspective to my problem. 
For me it just sux ass. 
If do not you think the same please tell me. 


-- 

diego, kde-il translation team

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