Re: [Freecats-Dev] Re: Free CATS and gettext - some homework for us ; -)

[Henri Chorand]

Hi,

> [...]
>
> > Projects like gettext should have studied earlier. Why was this
> > not done?
> > Because we did not really know about it, or nobody who knew
> > about it told us.
>
> The primary goal of gettext is translating so called `po' files with
> program messages. The best tool to suport it is propably Kbabel:
>
>         http://i18n.kde.org/tools/kbabel/

Yes, Stanislav Visnovsky, KBabel's maintainer, is on this list.

My concern was, none in our little group provided yet a detailed feedback of
gettext documentation in order to determine "areas of common interest" more
accurately.

Even though I'm not quite experienced enough as a developer, I'm trying to
perform such a review and will post a message in the next days.

Not that I pretend doing a huge, comprehensive comparative study of all
approaches, but I believe it's useful and has to be done - I already found a
few things worth mentioning.


> There are also attempts to reuse such tools for translating
> documentation, cf. "po for all" project:
>
> http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/po4a

Thanks for this link.


I believe the gettext approach has its limitations, and that even though it
seems to work well for a number of types of files, it may not be the best in
terms of user-friendliness, but it's important to learn more about what it's
doing and how it's doing it.


Also, if one takes the time to read po4a's FAQ, one can see the problems
associated with relying on "gettextization" and PO files - a translation
memory-based solution does seem to be better.


Henri