[Mailman-i18n] Re: Translating Mailman on Serbian

[Simone Piunno]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 01:02:13PM +0100, Nikola Djurovic wrote:

> We are thinking to use mailman and to develop it for Serbian Language.
> Would you be so kind and post some of your experience and a guidelines
> how we can start doing it, what tehnical knowledge-base we need to have,
> for us to be positive on being accepted for that work.

Hi Nikola, I'll answer here on the list because I think this thread is 
worth being published on the list archive.

You can start without much technical knowledge, but if you want to keep
your translation up-to-date (while the development branch evolves into
the next stable release) you'd better learn how to use cvs and diff.

Here is my recipe.

Basically, you'll start by copying templates/en/* to your sandbox dir
and then translating each file.  Keep in mind that %(foo)s is a 
variable reference (much like %s in C) and must be left untouched.
Also, you must be able to recognize a markup tag (eg, <foo>) because
they must be left untouched too, and you should know how to escape
non-ASCII characters, e.g. "è" -> "&egrave;", but only in html files.
Remember that if you need a literal % sign, it must be doubled: %%

Next, you copy messages/mailman.pot, renaming it to serbian.po.
You can open this file with kbabel (a tool included in KDE SDK) and
translate each string (original on the higher half of the window, your
translation on the bottom half).
If you are a masochist, you can even use emacs PO mode ;)
Keep attention to the same markers and escaping as above, with the added
complexity that here it's harder to say when a string is html (e.g. used
for web UI) or pure text (e.g used for email interface)

Then you try to compile you .po file:

 msgfmt -v -o serbian.mo serbian.po

No error messages should appear.

Next, copy your files on an installed mailman tree, and run
bin/transcheck XX
where XX is your coutry code.

No warning should appear (but maybe some warning is ok, if you really
know what you're doing).

Now, try to run your translation (add an "add_language" line to 
Mailman/Defaults.py) and check the many scattered pieces blend 
together well.  Sometimes you'll need some adjustment.

When you're satistied, pack up a tar.gz with the following structure:

messages/XX/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.po
messages/XX/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.mo
templates/XX/admindbdetails.html
templates/XX/admindbpreamble.html
.
.
templates/XX/userpass.txt
templates/XX/verify.txt

(XX is your country code) and send it to Barry Warsaw.

By that time, your translation could be somewhat obsolete, because
templates and mailman.pot could have been evolved meanwhile.
Don't panic.
You'll need to check diffs to find what changed and how, so that 
you can easily update your files.

Save everything everytime, you'll need it.

Bye

-- 
 Simone Piunno -- http://members.ferrara.linux.it/pioppo 
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