I've encountered a few problems with our usage of Pootle and am seeking advice from the experts on how best to proceed.
Problem 1) Alphabets versus Languages I've hit it with Serbian. They use two different alphabets Latin and Cyrillic. But only one language. Distinguished by two codes sr-Latn and sr-Cyrl. The same issue occurs in Chinese Hans/Hant/Ming/* and has been hacked around previously by appending the specific ISO-3166 country code where its most frequently needed. What I'm hoping for is to use the ISO-3066 alphabet codes as part of the language tag somewhere. The options that appear to be present now are: (a) create a fake country code and do the xx_YY code hack to create entire new languages as per Chinese (eww) (b) add two .po files with sr-Latn.po and sr-Cyrl.po names. This latter seems cleaner and will be of some help when problem (3) starts to happen. But when last tested broke the use of templates as described in problem (2) below. It may also bring up issues with pootle reporting language X having twice as many words as other languages, thus falsely incomplete reported for one or other alphabet. Also, as in the case with Chinese when the alphabets have different special characters and maybe even grammer rules things break badly. I can see at least two other languages on the horizon with similar alphabet issues. How has other peoples experience been with multiple .po files per language for one .pot? FYI: Web language codings are tagged by the BNF ::= ISO-639-* ['-' ISO-3066] ['-' ISO-3166]. Pootle denies (a) the use of '-' in language codes, and AFAICT (a) the use of more than 2 chars. So these all have to be hacked down to xx_YY (making ISO-639-2 and ISO-639-* '-' ISO-3066 base codings unusable). With the Chinese hacks things get nasty very fast. Feature Request: If Pootle accepted ISO-3066 alphabet codes in language codes the Chinese hack could easily be dropped out of existence for us in favor of Hans/Hant namings. Problem 2) Pootle folder structure. I've been using a flat folder layout with no templates How to use the update-from-templates feature when the .po are all symlinks to files with slightly different names (ISO639-ISO3066-ISO3166 named, not ISO639_ISO3166 named). And/or the multiple files needed for problem (1). I've experimented on 1.3 a while back and that just resulted in: * erasure of the symlinks, replaced with physical files (empty like the .pot). * loss of .po files not explicitly named identical to the available language ie (X.pot -> $LANG/$LANG.po) Do the 2.0 improvements help with these at all? Also, if I go for a solution to problem (1) where a specific language has two ISO-3066 sub-coded .po (ie $POTNAME '_' $LANG '-' ISO-3066 '.po') will that feature update both to the .pot? one? neither? Problem 3) potential clash. I am about to begin dealing with system locale encoding xx_YY encodings AND web encodings simultaneously within each language. Different .pot for each style. Any clues as to where start looking for guidance on that nest of issues? Amos Squid Project ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Translate-pootle mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/translate-pootle
