resource file is not translation friendly.
Hi. I wondered if I could help translating the resource file to Japanese. But I noticed some problems, so I want to let it to be known. First, I couldn't find a preferred way to contribute resource file translations. Its a common topic in a project like this, so I think it should be clearly documented in an easily found place. Second, I found out that in a couple of cases, the resource string items contain small fragments of sentences, rather than full sentences. This makes it impossible or hard to provide a meaningful translation in languages that have different syntax structures like Japanese. You need to make much more use of the parameters like {0} and {1} and write the full sentence. I will show the ones that I noticed. helponsyntax=Help on the I haven't seen this on the xwiki UI yet. I think this sentence is followed by a text box or a pulldown. So the actual sentence is probably like: Help on the [____]. But in Japanese the sentence structure has to be something like [_____] no help wo hyoji. So adding the label on the left of the UI doesn't work. For very simple statements, english has the structure Verb + object. Japanese has the structure Object + verb. Also I noticed a line: youcan=You can In English you write "You can [do something]", but in Japanese, you write "[do something] dekimasu". So a successful resource string would be youcan=You can {0}. and the Japanese version would be youcan={0} dekimasu. If the "You can" was followed by a structure of UI elements such as a list of checkbox items, A translation friendly label would be a full sentence like "You can do the following:". I stopped translating the file after working on it for about 3 minutes because I felt that there would be many of these. I hope the structure gets revised. I hope even more that someone else translates it to Japanese :-P I like the software itself. It has features that I am looking for. -- natto is japanese food. I chose it for my alias. -- _______________________________________________ Surf the Web in a faster, safer and easier way: Download Opera 9 at http://www.opera.com Powered by Outblaze
Hello, You are right. There are more problems with the resource files, like: - Most of the resources are not used anymore, but were left there for older versions of the skin - When most of the resources were added, there was no support for {0} {1}... placeholders, so the easiest thing to do was to just translate portions of the string, around the variables - There are still many strings which are not bundled in the resource file - There are some discrepancies between the ApplicationResources.propertiesand the ApplicationResources_en.properties files, which means that some of the strings in ApplicationResources.properties are replaced by another variant So, what needs to be done: 1. ApplicationResources_en.properties must be merged back into ApplicationResources.properties and removed, so that future conflicts/overrides are eliminated 2. The whole skin files / wiki documents in the default database must be re-internationalized, making use of the {x} placeholders 3. The same thing should be done for the other two versions of the skin in the trunk I don't think that any of the official developers has time for this, so it would be great if somebody from the community could do it and send a patch. Regards, Sergiu Dumitriu On 2/27/07, Natto Lover <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi. I wondered if I could help translating the resource file to Japanese. But I noticed some problems, so I want to let it to be known.
First, I couldn't find a preferred way to contribute resource file translations. Its a common topic in a project like this, so I think it should be clearly documented in an easily found place.
Second, I found out that in a couple of cases, the resource string items contain small fragments of sentences, rather than full sentences. This makes it impossible or hard to provide a meaningful translation in languages that have different syntax structures like Japanese. You need to make much more use of the parameters like {0} and {1} and write the full sentence.
I will show the ones that I noticed.
helponsyntax=Help on the
I haven't seen this on the xwiki UI yet. I think this sentence is followed by a text box or a pulldown. So the actual sentence is probably like:
Help on the [____].
But in Japanese the sentence structure has to be something like
[_____] no help wo hyoji.
So adding the label on the left of the UI doesn't work. For very simple statements, english has the structure Verb + object. Japanese has the structure Object + verb.
Also I noticed a line: youcan=You can
In English you write "You can [do something]", but in Japanese, you write "[do something] dekimasu". So a successful resource string would be youcan=You can {0}. and the Japanese version would be youcan={0} dekimasu.
If the "You can" was followed by a structure of UI elements such as a list of checkbox items, A translation friendly label would be a full sentence like "You can do the following:".
I stopped translating the file after working on it for about 3 minutes because I felt that there would be many of these. I hope the structure gets revised. I hope even more that someone else translates it to Japanese :-P
I like the software itself. It has features that I am looking for.
-- natto is japanese food. I chose it for my alias.
participants (2)
-
Natto Lover -
Sergiu Dumitriu