[Qt5-feedback] Translation in Qt5

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Fri, Jul 01, 2011 at 09:39:09AM +0200, ext Philippe wrote:
> My application is locallized in 6 languages, there are 8200 items with a
> total of 76000+ words. So, this can be called a big project.
> 
uh, yes. i imagine the merging phase for each .ts file to be incredibly
slow (lupdate has a serious scalability problem there).

what you probably *don't* miss too much despite the size of the project
is translation memory - that's because everything is inside a single
file anyway. but if you have many smaller projects, many of which
duplicate basic messages, or have many similar messages, then the lack
of proper TM becomes a serious drawback.

> * Automatic context (which is not bug free) has never been a problem for
> the 4 translators. GUI class names can often give an hint.
>
the experience with commercial translators is that they are too clueless
to use the class names. and the unnecessary duplicates push up costs.

> If you want to remove this, hmm... you can imagine the amount ot work to
> update the sources :-(
> 
manually adding context tags would apply to all short items (i.e., no
real sentences).
yes, the effort is quite significant. but you get proper annotations, no
more guessing, much easier to translate without digging into code.
additionally, you may implement styleguide checking for messages, etc.

note that the old system will stay in place, be it because we promised
no unnecessary source incompatibilities.

> * the most annoying part in the whole process is the following one: the
> english text is also reviewed by english writers, ie. not programmers,
> and mistakes are to be correctd or improvements to be done. This task is
> long and painful. Ideally, there should be a "Jump" button in Linguist
> (command line configurable), to open the source file and jump to the
> line where the string is written.
> 
yes, that's a todo item. now find someone to implement it. ;)
this is in fact the one thing where a proper integration of linguist
into creator would make sense.

> * For productivity, I chose to create a small tool to complement
> Linguist (to edit .ts files), and add these features:
> 
> 1) To improve my productivity for french translations: support for
> Google Translate. I don't know for other languages, but for french,
> this has cut down my translation time by at least 2 (certainly more,
> in fact, so less typing).  Would be so easy to add to Linguist.
> 
i'm not sure the google terms of use would allow us to do that. if they
do, then feel free to submit a patch ...

> 2) improved statistics: to better have an overview of what's done and left
> to do. Important to evaluate translator's time and also pay them.
> 
also a todo item ...

> 3) More checking on the translated items, taking the english as
> reference. This could be application dependent (eg. I sometimes have
> predefined $variables$ in ui strings, and the spelling must be
> fault-less).
> 
such custom semantical checks would require scripting or plugins. i have
no idea how much effort it would be to add that.