launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Danilo Šegan <danilo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rob,

У сре, 29. 09 2010. у 08:37 +1300, Robert Collins пише:
> I'm curious about two closely related things.
> 
> Firstly, how well does Launchpad Translations support translation of
> websites? I suppose that one can just say 'generate a pot file and we
> can spit out po/mo files', but perhaps there are idioms/aspects that
> web apps commonly do that don't fit great into that model?

The only thing that web apps seem to do is use a directory layout for
i18n that Launchpad doesn't readily accept (i.e.
template/<langcode>/LC_MESSAGES/<langcode>.po where we want simply
template/<langcode>.po).

The thing that PO files generally don't handle well is making sure that
produced messages are at least well-formed XML/HTML snippets (ideally,
it'd also be possible to check if they are valid XML or HTML), but this
is definitely not a blocker.

And as Brad said, there are a few web site projects that are happily
using Launchpad for translations.

> Secondly, is there any reason we haven't made Launchpad translatable?

The foremost reason is that it will complicate collaboration in that
localized web site will "invite" people to write bug reports, comments
and all the project descriptions in their native tongue.  Without
carefully thinking how we can also leverage our lovely translators
community to get such data translated back into English where
appropriate we'd be in for a fun ride (not that we don't already get
project descriptions in a language other than English, but those are
usually very highly oriented to a certain local community).

Basically, doing good i18n requires effort that we haven't invested yet.
Just to scratch the surface: things like sentence composition and
geeky/domain language are a big problem for proper l10n, so we'd have to
improve all of that; not to mention that we'd have to lay some
groundwork for plural forms support.

FWIW, David Planella (of Ubuntu Translations :) has recently wondered
about how much effort would it take to i18n at least Launchpad Answers.
We are probably going to have a session during UDS to discuss that (he
wants to see if there's community interest in picking that up).

Cheers,
Danilo