The Translate Toolkit - Mozilla to PO: its current state and how to use it
Dwayne Bailey
Toolkit. Some were wrong, or based on ancient experience, some might
have been right but the complainant provided no information about what
problem they experienced, or what they found lacking. So we are unable
to correct that.
Lets just set the record straight for others.
Here are URLs:
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/index - for the toolkit
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/moz2po - Mozilla to PO
conversion
The Good
* The toolkit is designed to convert Mozilla l10n
files: .dtd, .properties, etc to PO format. The motivation being to
reuse existing PO resources and know-how and to allow easier migration
and tracking of localisation as PO is a bilingual format.
* We process almost all of the formats presented by Mozilla. We cope
with all anomalies in DTD and .properties files. Including merging
accelerators, ignoring messages with DONT_TRANSLATE flags. We even
manage some of the Pseudo properties files and others. We do handle the
entity within comment issue and have a unit test framework to track any
of these anomalies. Any old style \u issues are converted to Unicode in
the PO file.
* We work directly against files in CVS l10n/, we used to work with XPIs
but no longer support this.
* Once your translations are in PO format you never have to worry about
what has been added, removed, renamed, or updated in your translations.
This is all handled by the Gettext tools. Then po2moz will convert them
corrected to the .dtd and .properties files.
The bad and the ugly
* Our xhtml and html conversion is poor. But many people don't
translate those actively. Fixes welcome. They might work but we don't
use them ourselves.
* We do not do RDF files. Although these seems simple to add for anyone
who has the time.
* This bug http://bugs.wordforge.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129 tracks issues
that remain. If you look you will see that many of these are minor or
feature adds that add more value then the current .properties, .dtd
combo and are not deficiencies.
I hope that helps people who might have been confused by conflciting
information.
--
Dwayne Bailey
Translate.org.za
+27-12-460-1095 (w)
+27-83-443-7114 (cell)