пятница, 24 июля 2009 г.

Testing KDE 4.3 translation with Lokalize

I created Lokalize script to automate UI translation testing: it compiles currently opened PO file and puts it under ~/.kde where KDE can see it, so that when you start your application next time, it will use your translation.

To use it for your language (you'll need Lokalize coming with KDE 4.3):

cd trunk/l10n-kde4
svn up scripts
dolphin scripts/lokalize

then open Lokalize with project for your language, go to Project -> Configure project -> Scripts and drag-n-drop msgfmt.rc from dolphin to the settings area in Lokalize. Restart Lokalize. You should see a new item under Tools menu.

To make this script available automatically for all your team members copy this msgfmt.rc to l10n-kde4/LANG/lokalize-scripts (they will also need to svn up trunk/l10n-kde4/scripts).


Now a few words on packages.
I have been given write access to Debian KDE packaging repository (thanks to Sune Vuorela), where I was able to specify right dependencies and recommended packages for Lokalize. If any of other distro packagers are reading this, please sip on the spec.

P.S. I installed kde 4.2.96 packages from debian experimental (it conflicts with kdevelop package, so I reinstalled kdevelop manually with dpkg -i kdevelop_3.9.94-1_i386.deb afterwards).

1 комментарий:

Oceanwatcher комментирует...

I don't know how to turn the interface into English, so if this appears as a comment, I have been very lucky :-)

First of all - I have been looking for something like Lokalize for a long time. It seems like it will be the answer to all my searching. But I need some help to get started as it seems it is more for programmers than for translators that do not know anything about programming...

The translation I am doing is manuals and some language files that are not in the po format. The manuals/user documentation is most often either in Word format or .odt. I think .odt would be a great format to support as most documents can be converted into this.

The language files are in plain text format, UTF-8. And organized like:

TRANSLATE STRING=Translate string

The first part in upper case and the = should be kept, the second part should be translated. The files have .ini extension (not related to anything on Windows).

Has anyone wrote any scripts that would allow the translation of these formats? Is there a place where I can chat with someone that know how to use this software?

I have it installed, but it is not possible to create a new project. That menu choice is greyed out.

I think this is a really important project that will benefit ALL open source projects, not only KDE!