Problems on Chinese translation (zh_CN.po and zh_CN.mo)

[Clark]

Hi,
I find that the Chinese translation (wxWidgets 2.6) has two problems as
follows:

1. The first problem is about menu items' accelerator key.

For example, the menu item for saving file is "&Save", which indicates
"S" is the accelerator key. But in Chinese word for "save", there is
no a letter "S". Hence we append a "(&S)" after the Chinese word for
"save". The problem is in zh_CN.po of wxWidgets, "(&S)" is replaced
with "[&S]".

I think "()" is more popular than "[]" here in Chinese software.
All other menu items such as "&File", "&Help", etc. have the same problem.

2. The encoding of the locale file "zh_CN.po" is utf-8, but usually
Chinese people use gb2312 or gb18030 (cp936).

I think I could fix the zh_CN.po file, and How can I submit it to wxWidgets?

[liou...@hotmail.com]

The accelerator key using "[&#]" is an inherited usage from the early translation, to keep the style stable, I leave it unchanged for now; personally, I agree it should replace with "(&#)", :)

Best,

Liou Xiao

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[Clark]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 01:49:29PM +0800, liou...@hotmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> UTF-8 can be easily handled by most PO tools(e.g. PoEdit), and it's also useful while you're editing the PO file in Linux, so I think it's unnecessary to change the encoding back to GB2312 or GB18030.

But GB18030 is sufficient to provide Chinese characters.
Can you tell me how to add more strings that are non-standard
menus/dialogs' captions/contents in an application? Does it need to
write new PO files? Can the new PO file be GB18030? How to use the new strings in an application?

>
> I'd like to point out that GB2312 charset can't provide enough Chinese characters, and should not be chosen here.
>

> Best,
>
> Liou Xiao
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Clark" <foo....@gmail.com>
> To: <wx-tran...@lists.wxwidgets.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2005 6:42 PM
> Subject: [wx-translators] Problems on Chinese translation (zh_CN.po and zh_CN.mo)
>
>

[Clark]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 03:04:10PM +0800, liou...@hotmail.com wrote:
> The accelerator key using "[&#]" is an inherited usage from the early translation, to keep the style stable, I leave it unchanged for now; personally, I agree it should replace with "(&#)", :)

Yes. It looks strange. I think the most important advantage of
wxWidgets is it's native look-and-feel. But the "[&#]"s of menu items
look out-of-date. I even notice that zh_TW.po uses "(&#)". If it's easy
to change, why not just do it?

>
> Best,
>
> Liou Xiao
>

Regards,

Clark

[Vaclav Slavik]

Hi,

Clark wrote:
> 2. The encoding of the locale file "zh_CN.po" is utf-8, but usually
>    Chinese people use gb2312 or gb18030 (cp936).

UTF-8 is used as file's charset here, it is converted to wide char
Unicode string or to your system's native charset when the file is
loaded. UTF-8 is really the best choice for storing the files (and
not just Chinese, catalogs for any language).

Regards,
Vaclav

--
PGP key: 0x465264C9, available from http://pgp.mit.edu/

[liou...@hotmail.com]

Hi,

UTF-8 can be easily handled by most PO tools(e.g. PoEdit), and it's also useful while you're editing the PO file in Linux, so I think it's unnecessary to change the encoding back to GB2312 or GB18030.

I'd like to point out that GB2312 charset can't provide enough Chinese characters, and should not be chosen here.

Best,

Liou Xiao

----- Original Message -----
From: "Clark" <foo....@gmail.com>
To: <wx-tran...@lists.wxwidgets.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2005 6:42 PM
Subject: [wx-translators] Problems on Chinese translation (zh_CN.po and zh_CN.mo)

[liou...@hotmail.com]

However, GB18030 can't be recognized by some popular PO tools, e.g. PoEdit. What's more, UTF-8 encoding is also OK for our Chinese people, it is supported by both MS Windows and Linux, you can even use "Notepad.exe" to open an UTF-8 file.

As I mentioned above, you'd use PO tools to edit these locale files, and "PoEdit" is a free and powerful tool running on Windows platform, you can download it at http://www.poedit.org/index.orig.php, just try it.

I'm not sure what "non-standard" string you said, as far as I know, we'd translation PO file basing the template file (wxstd.po or *.pot), so if you want to add more strings not included in the template, I'm afraid you'd do hardcoding work, ;-)