Ted Gould pensò:
Yeah, and I'm not sure what to do with the problem. It is the same one that we have with the .inx files, but I think this comes to a different solution. I'm thinking about making the whole XML file translatable...
No, just mark strings translatable and generate the po with xmlpo. This is the usually recommended solution...
I realize that this has some issues, let me try to put pros and cons here:
Cons
- Translators have to know and create valid XML in a particular format
- Translators can significantly change the menu layout in Inkscape, and
may create usability issues.
- I really wanted to make it so that Effects would dynamically modify
the internal XML for menu placement, that'd be impossible if all menus are not direct translations (which isn't always reasonable, see below)
- Translators cannot use tools as gtranslator, kbabel or online tools that work only with po files; - The translation of the XML cannot be easily checked by scripts like the ones in the gnome.org CVS, so the translators have to check manually for changes in the po and other statistics;
Pros
- All strings can be translated
I'm not sure this is a pro. From a traslator point of view it is not. It make easy to translate string that have to be not translated. Just mark string to be translated translatable and edit the generated po file...
- Menus can be moved with the translation. I'm having a hard time
trying to explain this, and I think it is partially because I'm basically mono-lingual. Here's my best effort. Let's say Inkscape had a "Free" menu where we had things that were zero cost and personal freedoms (I'm trying here). If you were to translate this into Spanish directly, the menu would have to be the "Gratis y libre" menu. It would make more sense in a Spanish translation to have two menus.
This makes the ui change based on the locale, which I think is not a good idea...