TRANSLATORS

[D. Michael McIntyre]

I don't really want to be our Spanish translator, but the job has fallen on me
once again.  I've worked on this for several days of long hours, and I have
whittled the Spanish translation down to fewer than 300 to go.

The QObject context was the worst by far.  Even with help from the KDE
translation team, there was an enormous amount of quite difficult stuff to
translate here.  The good news is that this context is the key to getting
Rosegarden to appear in your native language, and the vast majority of
difficult strings only have to be translated once in the lifetime of the
project.

Alexandre complained about having to translate all the obscure instrument
names twice, both for our comprehensive database of "instrument parameter
presets" and for the entire General MIDI program set.  It is true that the Qt
tools don't do anything to go from "Saxophone" up here to "Saxophone 1" and
"Saxophone 2" down here, but Qt Linguist *does* do a great job of making
suggestions, and you will find that when you have translated everything at the
top of the file, the translations that are similar further down are a simple
matter of hitting Ctrl+[1-5] and typing a couple of characters.  This same
thing is broadly true throughout Rosegarden, where we have a depressing number
of strings that only vary by the accelerator, by having or not having trailing
periods, and by the same string appearing in several different contexts, but
Qt not being able to supply the translation automatically with its "same-text
heuristic" for whatever reason.  This is a lot of tedious, annoying work, but
the "quick suggestion" feature in Qt Linguist does make it much less painful.

Now that I have gotten involved with this translation, Rosegarden is changing
gears and getting into more of a release mode.  We don't yet have a formal
string freeze, and we can't yet have a complete feature freeze, but these
areas have grown very, very cold to the touch, and they will be freezing quite
soon.  I have been making a number of string changes in the source that do
have the short-term effect of creating more work for people who have already
gotten their translations 100% complete, but these should be of great benefit
to those of you who are just about to get started.  Most of this work is
finished now; for example, eliminating a number of obscure and difficult to
translate error message boxes, and simplifying some wording that really didn't
need to be that complicated.

I suggest that those of you who have not yet begun to do any serious work on
your translations are quite safe to work on all those QObject strings now, and
all the rest of this should be settled very soon now; perhaps in less than a
week.  Even then, it won't be a complete string freeze, and there will be a
few strings to work on just before the release, but this is a good time to get
the bulk of the heavy dictionary flipping out of the way, safe in the
knowledge that you won't have to do it three times.

Somebody remind me to update the translator instructions too...  I'll have to
do that tomorrow.

Well, good luck folks!  No doubt about it, this is an ugly, thankless job.
--
D. Michael McIntyre

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day
trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on
what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with
Crystal Reports now.  http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july
_______________________________________________
Rosegarden-devel mailing list
Rosegarden-devel@... - use the link below to unsubscribe
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Friday 06 November 2009, D. Michael McIntyre wrote:
>  Now that I have gotten involved with this translation, Rosegarden is
>  changing gears and getting into more of a release mode.

This is still true, though it might be wise for people to hang back just a
little while longer, until I make it all the way through my translation.  I'm
finding new things constantly and going off to correct them in the source.  
I'm not doing much to eliminate some of the petty annoyances involved in the
translation, but I've removed a number of completely useless strings, and I've
made a considerable number of minor stylistic corrections that will make
existing translations obsolete.  Only minor changes are required in these
cases.

Also, I'll have a new batch of error messages and other minor whatnot to add
to the pile before it's all over.

I'm going to try to sit down and make up some instructions one day soon too.
--
D. Michael McIntyre

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day
trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on
what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with
Crystal Reports now.  http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july
_______________________________________________
Rosegarden-devel mailing list
Rosegarden-devel@... - use the link below to unsubscribe
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel