[haiku] Re: Haiku's localization vocabulary guidelines
- From: PulkoMandy <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:08:35 +0200
You are mostly right. With the current localization API it is possible
to use arbitrary numbers instead of english strings to do the lookup.
This has some drawbacks, however : first, its not really practical for
the app developper, and second, if there is no translation catalog
available, everything will be replaced by empty strings, making the
app unuseable. The idea is not to get a universal system with a global
lookup, there is a separation by application, context and comment. The
global system will only be used for small words you usually find alone
on a button. I agree that some of them may use the same word in
english and need diffreent words in other languages, so the idea was
to use constants like LOCALIZED_CANCEL_BUTTON_TEXT and
LOCALIZED_CANCEL_MENU_TEXT (well, if a "cancel" menu makes sense at
all). This is why I asked everyone to think about it. Each of us has
different experiences depending on the language he knows, each of us
can contribute to build a small list of words that needs to be
translated globally.
I want the translations to be as good as the original english version
of Haiku, In the english version there are some things you find in
multiple places (like the "Revert" word) and it seems a good idea to
keep this uniformity in other places, even if there may be some
distinction in other languages. This may even help improve and clean
up the english wording from some ambiguities.
Also, note the localization system is language-neutral, the jamrules
allow you to have sourcecode in any language if you don't want
english, and even if the master catalog extracted from the sourcecode
is a bit special (it's the master reference), it is possible to look
at the other catalogs and use one of them as a base for your
translation if you don't want to use the master one. The locale kit
does the lookup of strings even for english, it will not bypass
anything.
So, it will always be possible not to use the default translation in
some case. And I hope the translators will hint the developpers when
such a case happens.
--
Adrien.
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