Re: [Qemu-devel] Translation of strings in QEMU w/ gettext ?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Jun 02, 2015 at 04:34:09PM +0200, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> Am 02.06.2015 um 14:56 hat Daniel P. Berrange geschrieben:
> > In a number of cases libvirt includes the error message from QMP in the
> > message we pass back up to the user. Any errors from libvirt are always
> > translated, so if running libvirt in a non-en_US locale currently you
> > will get a translated message from libvirt which includes a bit english
> > text from QEMU.
> 
> The problem here is which locale to use. If the server uses a different
> locale than the client, not much is won. Can libvirt know on startup
> which language should be used?
> 
> Would we need a language per QMP connection? (Hopefully not.)

Libvirt doesn't have any client selected locale - whatever locale the
libvirtd server is started in is used for all strings. This is good
enough as the most common case will be people with both client and
server using the same locale.

> > Also, with the GTK ui frontend of QEMU now, you'll get some translation
> > of the user interface menu options thanks to GTK built-in translations,
> > but the rest are still english, which is not very satisfactory either.
> 
> As you noticed, this is not what happens, but I think this is the most
> important point: If you translate something, translate all of it.
> Mixed languages is worse than just English.
> 
> Currently the split is that the GTK UI is completely translated, and
> other parts (especially the monitor) isn't translated at all. This is
> a split that is easy to understand and doesn't feel like mixed
> languages.
> 
> If we want to extend it to the monitor, we need to translate all of the
> monitor (including all error messages that could eventually be passed to
> the monitor) in the same release. Sounds not impossible, but in this
> case we really can't do just half of it as we usually do with our
> conversions.

Well, even if all the code was translated, we would never guarantee that
all languages have 100% finished .po files. So incrementally updating the
QEMU source to mark more strings is not that different from a case where
all is marked but most translations are incomplete.

Regards,
Daniel
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