[tldoc] Translations for TeX Live programs (install-tl and tlmgr gui)

Norbert Preining preining at logic.at
Wed Aug 12 23:56:31 CEST 2009


Dear all,

recently I have reworked the translation system for our programs in
TeX Live, that is the GUI installation and the tlmgr GUI. It now
uses normal .po files (but not gettext itself, I wrote my own parser).

Now I would like to ask those of you having interest to help translating
the messages in the GUI installers (perltk, and wizard (new in 2009)),
and the tlmgr gui.

Maybe some of you have already experience with .po files, the format is
quite simple. But still it is best to use one of the many po-editors.
I myself use poedit(.sourceforge.net) which is available in many 
distributions, and as binaries from the web site for Windows, Linux
and (AFAIR) even Mac.

I also wrote some explanatory notes which can be found in
	Master/tlpkg/etc/howto-translations.txt
from which I will include the part for translators here.

If you have any questions or problems, please don't hesitate to contact
me, but be reminded that I am NOT (!) on the tldoc mailing list, so
put me on Cc.

If you have done any updates either check in the updates yourself or
send it to tldoc, Karl, or me.

Thanks a lot for all your work and all the best

Norbert


Dealing with translations of TeX Live programs
==============================================


For translators
---------------

using poedit (poedit.sf.net):

Starting new translation NN.po:
- start fresh poedit
- click on "File -> New catalog from POT file"
- select messages.pot (in tlpkg/translations/messages.pot)
- A dialog opens that asks for some fields, like
        Project name and version:
        Team:
        Team's email address:
        Language:
        Country:
        Charset: UTF-8
        Source code charset:
        Plural Forms:
  etc all of which is unknown to me, but I filled in at least the Language
  and the email of myself of tex-live at tug.org
- click "Ok"
- select where to save (either in tlpkg/translations/NN.po or somewhere else
  and send us the file)
- start translating

Editing an existing NN.po:
- start poedit
- open NN.po
- start translating


Translating and remarks:
- click on the bold strings, those are missing the translation
- please use \" instead of ", as can be seen in the original strings
- several lines in the translations are merged together *without* adding
  anything. So if you want new lines please use \n in the text
  (as seen in several original strings)


We do update the messages.pot daily (nightly) and merge the strings into 
all the .po files (using msgmerge). That means if we change one of the
english strings the translation will normally be marked as "fuzzy" in the
.po file.

In poedit those fuzzy translations are shown in red, telling you that those
have had a change in the original string and the translation should be
checked.

So before any of you start out with editing a translation, please fetch the
latest messages.pot and NN.po

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>        Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
gpg DSA: 0x09C5B094      fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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