Hello,
I repost this because I got no feedback at all. I guess it shows that my
email was long enough for not being read :)
Thanks, Mt.
On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 05:29:00PM +0200, Martin Quinson wrote:
In order to help the current discution to find an usefull conclusion, I
would like to propose you the following blahblah for inclusion in the debian
reference Managing packages chapter, for example after the one on porting
and geting ported. This is very far from being perfect, and I would be more
than happy to discuss it before the actual inclusion. But, please, do
respect the reply-to to debian-i18n, so that we discuss it on the right ML.
Friendly, Mt.
Internationalizing, translating and being internationalized and translated
Debian supports an ever-increasing number of natural language. Even if you
are native english speaker and do not speak any other language, it is part
of your duty as a maintainer to be aware of issues of internationalization
(abbreviated i18n because there is 18 letters between the 'i' and the 'n' in
internationalization). Therefore, even if you are ok with english only
programs, you should read most of this chapter.
According to Introduction to i18n from Tomohiro KUBOTA,
(http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/), I18N
(internationalization) means modification of a software or related
technologies so that a software can potentially handle multiple languages,
customs, and so on in the world. while L10N (localization) means
implementation of a specific language for an already internationalized
software.
l10n and i18n are tied, but the difficulties related to each of them are
very different. It's not really difficult to allow the program to change the
language in which texts are displayed based on user settings, but it is very
time consuming to actually translate the messages. On the other hand,
setting the character encoding is trivial, but adapting the code to use
several character encodings is a really hard problem.
Letting alone the i18n problems, where no general receipt exist, there is
actually no central infrastructure for l10n within Debian which could be
compared to the dbuild mecanism for porting. So, most of the work have to be
done manually
How are handled translations within Debian?
===
Handling translation of the texts contained in a package is still a manual
task, and the process depends on the kind of text you want to see
translated.
For program messages, the gettext infrastructure is used most of the time.
Most of the time, the translation is handled upstream within projects like
the Free Translation Project (http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/),
the Gnome translation Project (http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/) or
the KDE one (http://i18n.kde.org/). The only centralized resource within
Debian is the Central Debian translation statistics
(http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/), where you can find some statistics about
the translation files found in the actual package, but no real infrastucture
to ease the translation process.
An effort to translate the package descriptions started long ago even very
few support is offered by the tools to actually use them (ie, only APT can
use them, when configured correctly). There is nothing to do for the
maintainers, and the translators should use the DDTP
(http://ddtp.debian.org/).
For debconf templates, maintainer should use the po-debconf package to ease the
work of your translators, which should use the DDTP to do their work. Some
statistics can be found both on the DDTP site (about what is actually
translated), and on the Central Debian translation statistics site
(http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/ -- about what is integrated in the
packages).
For webpages, each l10n team have access to the relevant CVS, and the
statistics are available from the Central Debian translation statistics site.
For general documentation about debian, the process is more or less the same
than for the webpages (the translators have an access to the CVS), but there
is no statistics pages.
For package specific documentation (man pages, info document, other
formats), almost everything have yet to be done. Most notably, the KDE
project handles translation of its documentation in the same way than its
program messages. Debian specific man pages begin to be handled within a
specific CVS repository (http://cvs.debian.org/manpages/?cvsroot=debian-doc).
I18N L10N FAQ for maintainers
===
This is a list of problems that maintainers may face concerning i18n and
l10n. While reading this, keep in mind that there is no real consensus on
those points within Debian, and that they are only advices. If you have a
better idea for a given problem, or if you disagree on some points, feel
free to provide your feedback, so that this document can be enhanced.
How to get a given text translated?
---
To translate package description
