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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: translations on kde 3.3
From:       Heiko Evermann <Heiko.Evermann () gmx ! de>
Date:       2004-07-17 7:49:41
Message-ID: 40F8DA15.6070304 () gmx ! de
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Hi Stephan, hi Diego,

>  
>
>>For me it's even worst, since all those 90% English and 10% Hebrew
>>applications, are reversed as they should in Hebrew.
>>
>>Is there a way to fix this ugly situation? How do I force an application to
>>use the origianl translations?
>>    
>>
>Heiko?
>
>I guess, making a special exception for English would do the trick. So only
>if you got translations into the given list, you will get the kauderwelsch. 
>That is if you set Hebrew:German:English and got an app that has all 
>catalogues in at least Hebrew or German, it will be used, otherwise it
>will fall back directly to English.
>
Well, we had had some discussions in the list before I implemented it, 
and as far as I remember, there were several people who thought that 
this was an important feature for several languages.
The translation strings are drawn from the application's po-file 
(usually appname.gmo, sometimes some more like in konqueror) plus 
kdelibs.gmo and kio.gmo. kdelibs.gmo and kio.gmo should be in good shape 
as they are central to KDE. The old way was that translations were not 
shown at all, unless kio.gmo and kdelibs.gmo were present.

The idea was that we should present to the user as many translated 
strings as possible.

It is a bit unfortunate that such problems appear so long after the 
checkin, but at least there is still some time till the release of 3.3 
to solve the problems.

Concerning right to left for Hebrew we should have a closer look. What 
was the old way? You still would have had English strings whereever a 
Hebrew gmo file had an untranslated string. We already have a special 
handling for plural forms. (Eduard from the Upper Sorbian team had 
pointed that out and so it was included in the design.) For each loaded 
catalog file we keep the language and the plural type. And so we use 
English plural forming for English strings, Sorbian plural forming for 
Sorbian strings etc. I guess the problem for Hebrew is caused by 
evaluating the right-left/left-right switch from kdelibs.po, so that for 
a program that has no appname.gmo
1) the old way was to use English completely and using 
left-to-right-left from the English kdelibs.po
2) the new way is to use English strings, but to read right-to-left from 
the Hebrew kdelibs.po

Possible solutions
1) revert to the old way (highly undesirable for several languages where 
the new feature is important)
2) solve the RTL/LTR problem (How is displaying an English string done 
so far? What happens in Hebrew when a single string is not translated 
and the English string is displayed? What is the trick to display that 
string left-to-right?)
3) Add a switch to kcontrol, so that the user can choose, whether or not 
to merge languages.

Any comments are welcome.

My problem is: our second baby is due any moment. (Calculated birth date 
is Friday 23rd.) So I can not promise to code anything. I can try to 
have a look at all this, but once the baby is there, I will have to take 
care of my wife and our (then) two children. So I urgently need Your 
help to get this problem solved.

Kind regards,

Heiko

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