translating software

[celia petty]

open-ihm will be used in francophone west africa at the end of this year. Can anyone provide information/guidance on software translation?
We have two french speaking interns who can support this work
Many thanks
Celia

[Tiwonge Manda]

The can modify the text in the interface files, which have the file extension '.ui' under the path src/openihm/gui/designs. They can easily Modify the interface files and related text by using QT Desiger (http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/designer-manual.html)

 

regards

Tiwonge

 

Celia

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[Tiwonge Manda]

We can create a different branch for this purpose.

 

regards

Tiwonge

[celia petty]

Sounds good
Any word on the windows installation documentation (issue 260). This has become a critical issue
regards
Celia

[Tiwonge Manda]

is this fo open-hea or IHM? I see you have posted to the HEA list. All the same I will check with Brown, he should have some ready material on this

 

regards

Tiwonge

[celia petty]

the installation document is for ihm. translation applies to both projects. thanks for following up with Brown
regards
Celia

[Sarah Mount]

This is quite an unusual way of doing things. In the GNU framework there is a way of creating files of strings (pot files,  I think) that can be used to internationalise the software on installation, so that the language used by the GUI would be the same as the default language on the machine. I would assume that Qt has something similar.

What you are suggesting here is to change the entire ui directly, keep that new ui in a separate branch,  have someone responsible for keeping the "French" branch up to date with the other bug fix branches and create a separate "French" installer every time there is a release.  That's a lot more work than just keeping a .pot file up to date.

So,  I think it's worth folding out what the standard way of doing internationalisation is in Qt.

[Tiwonge Manda]

Thanks for the input Sarah. I will look that up

 

regards

Tiwonge

[Tiwonge Manda]

a quick search reveals the following:

- http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/internationalization.html

 

- http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/i18n-source-translation.html

 

- http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/linguist-manual.html

 

 we can now look this up in more detail

 

Tiwonge

[Wolf Ellis]

I suppose which system is best might depend on how well the automatic translation is able to identify the context?

 

If it translates everything correctly that would be great, but there could be the potential for it to wrongly translate words with multiple meanings in English…

 

Wolf

[Sarah Mount]

What automatic translation?

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[Wolf Ellis]

The .pot file that you mentioned, unless I’ve got the wrong end of the stick?

 

[I wonder how many automatic translation tools could correctly translate that…]

[Sarah Mount]

.pot files are written by humans, as far as I know, unless you have
seen anything different on the links that Tiwonge sent.

Sarah

Sarah Mount, Senior Lecturer, University of Wolverhampton
website: http://www.snim2.org/
twitter: @snim2

[Dai Clegg]

it's hard enough for human translators to translate .pots never mind automatons, becuas ethey are ful of little phrases without context.
for example i translated "child head of household" into French and back to English with Google translate and got "child's head home".


also once you start this, every single label on a piece of UI and every single error message has to be big enough to fit the translation in any language you might want to support, so typically the UI has to be designed with translation in mind and you have to have standards that everyone adheres to.

and of course every bug fix that touches the UI has to be translated.


oh, and for Excel it's different: here's one way to support multi-lingual spreadsheets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeMedr91q1g

d

[celia petty]

the Qt linguist manual is very helpful-thanks tiwonge. We need to work out the logistics now : possibly best discussed at the next IRC chat.