Help with new translation

[Anousak Souphavanh]

Hi All,

My team has completed translated Thunderbird version 1.07 and would like to upgrade to latest version of TB.  Please suggest.

 

Also my team would like to start Firefox translation, but heard that there are some changes in PO format and tools used for the translation of latest version. Please suggest in terms of tools and way to translate new files and etc.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Anousak

Lao Team

[Axel Hecht]

Anousak Souphavanh wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> My team has completed translated Thunderbird version 1.07 and would like
> to upgrade to latest version of TB. Please suggest.

You should work on the localization of the MOZILLA_1_8_0_BRANCH, i.e.,
Thunderbird 1.5.0.x. That code is stable and thus better to target than
a moving target like 2.0. Which of the two you actually end up with
depends on our timing as well as on yours.
Working towards 2.0 will be much easier from 1.5 than from 1.0, though,
so that's a good migration path.

> Also my team would like to start Firefox translation, but heard that
> there are some changes in PO format and tools used for the translation
> of latest version. Please suggest in terms of tools and way to translate
> new files and etc.

Well, as we don't have POs, I can't tell you anything here. The po tools
are maintained by their authors and should round trip somewhat smoothly.
Though my review of one of dwayne's localizations uncovered some
weaknesses there.

My suggestion would be to use an UTF-8 (no BOM) editor, complemented by
running the compare-locales script.

Axel

[Dwayne Bailey]

On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 18:17 +0100, Axel Hecht wrote:
> Anousak Souphavanh wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > My team has completed translated Thunderbird version 1.07 and would like
> > to upgrade to latest version of TB. Please suggest.
>
> You should work on the localization of the MOZILLA_1_8_0_BRANCH, i.e.,
> Thunderbird 1.5.0.x. That code is stable and thus better to target than
> a moving target like 2.0. Which of the two you actually end up with
> depends on our timing as well as on yours.
> Working towards 2.0 will be much easier from 1.5 than from 1.0, though,
> so that's a good migration path.
>
> > Also my team would like to start Firefox translation, but heard that
> > there are some changes in PO format and tools used for the translation
> > of latest version. Please suggest in terms of tools and way to translate
> > new files and etc.
>
> Well, as we don't have POs, I can't tell you anything here. The po tools
> are maintained by their authors and should round trip somewhat smoothly.
> Though my review of one of dwayne's localizations uncovered some
> weaknesses there.

We do roundtrip checking to make sure we produce good output, so far so
good. And we're fixing the issues picked up by Axel (thanks for the
feedback). Most difference turn out to be merely changes in whitespace.

You never know you might actually be one of the few teams who localise
the xhtml help as I've just added html2po (it has bugs so don't get too
excited just yet)

> My suggestion would be to use an UTF-8 (no BOM) editor,

If you do go this route you can always return to PO sanity :) by:

moz2po -t en-US my-moz-lang my-PO-lang

This way you end up back at a bilingual file and stop a lot of your pain
of tracking what changed between DTD and .properties iterations.

> complemented by
> running the compare-locales script.

Definitely run this. I've found it very helpful in making sure that
po2moz didn't break anything.

--
Dwayne Bailey
Translate.org.za

+27-12-460-1095 (w)
+27-83-443-7114 (cell)