Re: [Bug-XBoard] [bug #34972] Several issues regarding lokalization

[h.g. muller]

At 20:38 3-12-2011 +0100, Byrial Jensen wrote:

> Well, if you are able to use or convert the po-file, you are welcome. If 
> would be difficult for me to make a winboard file, as I don't use 
> MSWindows, and thus cannot even test if I messed up the file by some accident.

Unfortunately I have only a WinBoard .lng fileto .po coverter,and not the 
other way around. The conversion is non-trivial, because may of the English 
strings are ust a bit different (e.g. menu keys separated from item text by 
tabs, in stead of spaces).

> And if I should make a translation for Winboard, I wouldn't even know what 
> charset to use. UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 or some non-standard MS charset which 
> I don't know?

That is not very critical, as there are converters for that. That is also 
how I do the conversion .lng to .po: use an ed script to change the format 
without altering the translated strings, and then run the converter on the 
.pofiletomake it UTF-8. I don't know what a Danish Windows would use as 
charset, but I would guess it is Latin-1 (like all of Western Europe)

> I think a much more sound approach would be to also make Winboard use 
> gettext.

Unfortunately gettext does not work at all on WinBoard, because all menu 
and dialog texts are not in the C code, but in a Windows 'resource' file, 
which has to be compiled by the resource compiler, which does not 
understand gettext stuff. But the WinBoard system is not bad at all. You 
cannot damage anything, because the translation is just a data file, loaded 
by WinBoard when you select the language. So you can change language during 
the session, by simply picking another language from the menu. You don't 
even have to recompile for adding a new laguage. Just put the .lng file in 
the directory, and the next session the laguage will appear in the menu.

H.G.

> The po file format is much easier to work with for a translator as we can 
> use special po file editor programs that make sure that only the 
> translation and translation comments can edited, while the original text 
> and the file structure cannot be accidentially damaged. These programs 
> normally also have translation memory used to propose translations based 
> on similar texts in the same or other po files, good search and replace 
> functions etc.
>
> - Byrial