Hi Kinsley
I managed to do some 'translation' this morning.
Excellent.
However I got a bit confused by some of the stuff in the .po file Most of them are one-liners, no problems with these, but some are spread over a few lines. For example: #: ../src/dialogs/clonetiler.cpp:970 msgid "" "If you want to clone several objects, <b>group</b> them and <b>clone the " "group</b>." msgstr ""
Do I translate this just by filling out the msgstr as per the ones that seem to fit on one line?
what you display is strictly equivalent to (line 1) #: ../src/dialogs/clonetiler.cpp:970 (line 2) msgid "If you want to clone several objects, <b>group</b> them and <b>clone the group</b>." (line 3) msgstr ""
Which implies the split is only done for allowing a more comfortable reading of the file. You can translate like msgstr "blahhhh blahhhhhh blohhhh bluhhhhh"
or msgstr "" "blahhhh blahhhhhh blohhhh bluhhhhh"
or even msgstr "blahhhh " "blahhhhhh blohhhh bluhhhhh"
However, i should give you 2 or 3 advices : * use appropriate tools: poedit works fine on windows and linux kabel is generally the preferred soft under linux -> those tools allow you to directly translate, and not to care about the format of the files.
* taking a look at those pages can also provide you some help/guidelines/best practices/tools : http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/TranslationInformation http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/InterfaceTranslation#Interface_Trans...
* we usually discuss those topics on the translator ML https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-translator
I guess this file is somehow incorperated into c/c++ source and the strings get concatenated (by the compiler), so the blanks make no difference?
Mmm, it's a bit different. When compiling the software, some external tools (gettext), extract the translatable strings from the code and replace them by symbols. It also creates some files containing the different translations, linked against those symbols. The software is then compiled, and on execution, it loads the appropriate translated file and extract the UI strings from it.
Is there some kind of line-length limit (which is why the lines are split?)
Don't know what is the limit. I'd guess you should not try over the usual limitation of strings (255 chars). But once more, the best suggestion is using some dedicated tools that will care about those issues, and will allow you to save a lot of time and pain.
My laptop is broken at the moment (again for the 8th time, yay Benq!), so I only have access to Win32, so no tools I'm familiar with. It's taking me longer than I thought to correct all the North America-isms of 'British' English... it's mostly 'centre', 'colour' and 'randomise' so far.
Ah (was to forget): thank you for your work, and welcome on board.
BTW: Does Canada use English spelling or 'American English'?
No idea. Maybe some Canadian users have the answer.
Regards,
matiphas