Hello,


> I have translated a few POs that I will probably be mailing to Kulow soon.
> (No
> replacement yet?). They are definately not perfect, I'm worried about
> keeping
> them around without sending them in.

/me will probably be replacement (I added some of your .po files).


> I don't quite know how the internationalization stuff works, but I suspect
> that
> each time one of the output strings in one of the applications changes, a
> new
> POT is generated and some automated mechanism is applied to the PO files?
> This
> sort of mechanism would occasionally make errors, so we'd need to look at
> the
> stuff once in a while?

That's right. But the things, which could have errors have ,fuzzy comment
before them, so they can be easily found.

> Might it also cause a problem if I download a PO file, keep it around and
> slowly improve it locally without sending it in? Then it would slowly
> become
> out-dated as the POT changes and become more difficult to bring up-to-date
> again?

No, if somebody else won't update it while you're doing that... The new
.po file can be generated anytime from the old .po file using new .pot ;-))).

 
> Lastly, some applications (one obvious example is kmail.po, but a lot of
> the
> kcm*.po files too) don't seem to have strings in the POT for every string
> that
> apears on the screen. Is this caused by how the application is written or
> do I
> perhaps have a corrupted POT? If this is a bug in the programs, it might
> not
> actually be worth translating those programs at all, since a program that
> is
> half in english is worse than one which is completely in english.

Both can be true. When i18n.highscore (http://www.kde.org/i18n.highscore)
updates,
you should see how many strings are translated. If it reports no
untranslated/fuzzy
entries, the problem is in application (you should mail author in this case).

> Oh, and an afterthought :-) How important is it that the translators be
> running the latest (or recent) snapshots of kde? I think I'm the only one
> of
> the Icelandic translators who has bothered to install anything more recent
> than 1.0 (and a couple of apps didn't compile).

You don't need this while translating, but BEFORE release, you should
download the latest, let it compile and check everything ;-). It's funny
to see, how you translated an application you haven't seen (or part of it)
translated. But you should upgrade from CVS from time to time.

> I'm sending this in now, before it gets out of hand. E-mail tends to grow
> when
> left in the mail queue for too long.
;-)).
 

  Nice day,
    Juraj.