Re: Call for translations of forthcoming gnokii 0.6.27

[Daniele Forsi]

2008/9/16 Jari Turkia wrote:

> I will step forward for the Finnish language. Can you point me to a
> page/link/info what to do in detail. This .po-system is totally unfamiliar
> to me.

there are many generic resources

for KDE: http://techbase.kde.org/Localization
for Gnome: http://www.gnome.org/i18n/
for gettext in general: http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html

you need to edit po/fi.po which is a text file but it's better to use
a specialized editor that will check for syntax errors, find
untranslated strings or even suggest translations
if you open a .po with a normal editor you'll find text like this:

#: vcal.lx:285 vcal.lx:346 ../common/vcal.lx:284 ../common/vcal.lx:345
#: ../gnokii/gnokii-calendar.c:251 ../gnokii/gnokii-file.c:439
#: ../gnokii/gnokii-file.c:446 ../gnokii/gnokii-todo.c:162 ../smsd/file.c:186
#: ../xgnokii/xgnokii_contacts.c:2708 ../xgnokii/xgnokii_dtmf.c:101
#: ../xgnokii/xgnokii_logos.c:1371 ../xgnokii/xgnokii_speed.c:333
#, c-format
msgid "Can't open file %s for reading!\n"
msgstr ""

which means that the string "Can't open file %s for reading!\n" is
used in libgnokii (source files from common/), in gnokii, xgnokii and
smsd (source files from gnokii/, xgnokii/ and smsd/)
and that it is untranslated because msgstr is empty (in this case the
English string is shown to the user); for widely used messages such
this, it's better if you use the same exact words commonly used in
your language (check guidelines for KDE or Gnome), for more specific
strings you might find inspiration in gnome-phone-manager
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/phonemgr/trunk/po/

I'd suggest you first look at translations for strings containing the
word "error", since they are more useful for users that need help,
then you could look at the strings containing "can't", "couldn't",
"failed" (for the same reason)
another approach could be to translate only the strings used in a
specific piece of code, eg all strings from common/ or from
gnokii/gnokii-sms.c

you can convert existing strings from iso-8859-1 to UTF-8, if it makes
a difference for you

note that since I committed an updated fi.po to CVS, you will get
conflicts if you try cvs update (delete your old local copy or have
cvs overwrite it)

one thing that you need to know is how to reorder arguments, eg for dates:

#: ../gnokii/gnokii-calendar.c:127
#, c-format
msgid "   Start date: %d-%02d-%02d\n"
msgstr "   Data inizio: %3$d/%2$02d/%1$04d\n"

gnokii would print start date as Y-M-D but the Italian way is D/M/Y
%1$04d means "print the 3rd argument of the untranslated string with
leading zeros and a length of 4 digits"

don't forget to update the header of the .po file with your name (see
it.po for an example)
-- 
Daniele Forsi