These are my thoughts so far on the whole translation problem. Thoughts and comments welcome.
First, a quick apology: There is a system for translating JAWS scripts, using .jsm files to separate translatable material from code; but the scripts, as they exist now, make very poor use of that system. I have occasionally made progress in fixing this, but it is a long and tedious process to do completely. Besides that though, I consider that system significantly inadequate for the task, compared to a system I am about to propose. As I see it, there are two kinds of translation when you want to localize a script. The first is translation of output, meaning things that JAWS is told to say by the scripts. This is a matter of translating one string to another based on its meaning. For example, if I put a string in the code like, "There are %1 contacts online," translating would just require someone familiar with both English and another language to translate that. The "%1," btw, is sort of a placeholder for the actual number of contacts. I will not discuss this translation case further here as it is a pretty straightforward concept that just requires time to accomplish, except to point out that the .jsm system is reasonably able to handle this case when the code is written right for it. Sadly, some of the Skype code is currently not written right for it though. The other kind of translation deals, as has been said in this thread, with text that appears on screen and that the scripts need to locate. This is actually not a matter of "translation" per se, but a matter of locating the same text while running Skype in another language to see what text actually appears there. To do that, of course you would need to know exactly where to find the text in the first place. To answer the question of why some things work in any language and some don't: Not all functions of the scripts depend on screen text, and I try to minimize this dependence as a rule, specifically because the second kind of translation then becomes necessary. However, some things do require screen text now, and those will not work without the second type of translation. I have actually come up with a plan to handle this problem, but per usual, it requires time I often find lacking. The plan is to create a file in which messages in all languages are stored--a .ini-style file that is. Each message would have a name that is language independent, then a translation into English and each other language. For the first kind of messages (output only), the names would be fairly arbitrary, though generally descriptive of their purpose, such as "msgContactsOnline. For the screen text messages though, the names would be the actual message names used internally by Skype, as shown in Skype's language editor. That way, translating the screen text message into any Skype language becomes really easy: Find the message by its name, see what it says in your language of choice, enter that into the file, and voila! But there are some time-consuming problems with my plan. First, not all screen-text messages right now will exactly match any one Skype message. Fixing that would require code changes I'm sure. Second, we will need some way of entering so-called UniCode strings into scripts, for those languages (like Russian) that don't use the Roman alphabet. Then of course there's the time needed to write the code to support the new system, though I'm not sure that would take me long once I worked out the other two issues. I will close by explaining why I regard the .jsm system as inadequate. First, it requires separate installations of scripts for each language. JAWS itself requires this though because of its way of putting scripts into different folders by language; so this problem is minor from the user's perspective. My main problem with the .jsm approach is a bit complicated, but here goes an attempt to explain: I listed two types of translation. For the first, output only, all you need in order to choose an output language is the JAWS language abbreviation currently in effect. This is easy enough to get and so is not a big problem. The second type, screen text, however, is an issue, because the language you need depends on what language the user has set the application to use. The choices of input language may also be totally different than the choices of JAWS language, as is certainly true with Skype. Properly handling this problem requires the scripts to be able to switch input languages right along with the user's switching the application language. A .jsm file can not easily handle this. .ini files, btw, are not perfect either: They are very inconvenient for long, multi-line text strings. I'm actually considering working out a way to make JAWS pull messages from an XML file for this reason, but that idea needs significant testing for its performance impact before deployment. Sorry for the length of this. I just thought I should expose this corner of my mind for examination. <grin> On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 11:49:13AM +0100, Jean Philippe wrote: Dear Sarah Doug and all, I don't know much about scripting either. But there's one thing I know, which is that to perform its duty, the script needs to localise items to click on in a given window. One of the ways to do this is to localise a certain string of text. It's not the only way but it's the easiest. The drawback is that the string of text defers according to the language in which the application is set. What's funny is that most of the functions work when Skype is not set to English, only a few of them don't. Doug, , what do you think? Cheers, JPR http://myspace.com/jeanphilipperykiel ----- Original Message ----- From: Sarah To: mbarbi at fastwebnet.it ; a list for discussing skype and its use with screen accesssoftware. Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2008 6:42 AM Subject: Re: [Skypeenglish] R: to all non-English Skype users Tha'ts a bit daunting for now is it not? I know not how to script so I'm not sure about that. Sarah Alawami Check out my music page at http://music.marrie.org Thanks and have a wonderful day. ----- Original Message ----- From: <mbarbi at fastwebnet.it> To: "a list for discussing skype and its use with screen accesssoftware." <skypeenglish at emissives.com> Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 10:28 AM Subject: [Skypeenglish] R: to all non-English Skype users The thing someone can do is to translate the scripts in order to make them work properly in a non'english language. Bye bye. Barbuz -- msg. originale -- Oggetto: [Skypeenglish] to all non-English Skype users Da: "Jean Philippe" <jp.rykiel at orange.fr> Data: 28/03/2008 17:44 Hi there, I think I discovered something important. Maybe it was obvious to some of you but I think it's good to remind it here. Some of the script features are not available if Skype is not set to English. For example, that was the reason of me not having the typing sound working. All I had to do is set Skype to English and everything was back to normal, I now have the typing sound and the" who is typing" announcement. I don't know if Dug can do something about it, as it would be of course more comfortable for each of us to have Skype said to his own language. Cheers, JPR http://myspace.com/jeanphilipperykiel Thanks for posting to the skype english list. To access scripts for the latest version of skype go to http://www.dlee.org/skype To access tutorials and other goodies go to http://www.marrie.org/skype/skype.html thanks and have a wonderful day. _______________________________________________ Skypeenglish mailing list Skypeenglish at emissives.com http://emissives.com/mailman/listinfo/skypeenglish_emissives.com Thanks for posting to the skype english list. To access scripts for the latest version of skype go to http://www.dlee.org/skype To access tutorials and other goodies go to http://www.marrie.org/skype/skype.html thanks and have a wonderful day. _______________________________________________ Skypeenglish mailing list Skypeenglish at emissives.com http://emissives.com/mailman/listinfo/skypeenglish_emissives.com Thanks for posting to the skype english list. To access scripts for the latest version of skype go to http://www.dlee.org/skype To access tutorials and other goodies go to http://www.marrie.org/skype/skype.html thanks and have a wonderful day. _______________________________________________ Skypeenglish mailing list Skypeenglish at emissives.com http://emissives.com/mailman/listinfo/skypeenglish_emissives.com Thanks for posting to the skype english list. To access scripts for the latest version of skype go to http://www.dlee.org/skype To access tutorials and other goodies go to http://www.marrie.org/skype/skype.html thanks and have a wonderful day. _______________________________________________ Skypeenglish mailing list Skypeenglish at emissives.com http://emissives.com/mailman/listinfo/skypeenglish_emissives.com -- Doug Lee dgl at dlee.org SSB BART Group doug.lee at ssbbartgroup.com http://www.ssbbartgroup.com In laughter, love is found; but in tears, it is forged. (12/09/01)
