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List:       lyx-devel
Subject:    Re: Translating the labels
From:       rgheck <rgheck () bobjweil ! com>
Date:       2009-06-24 15:24:31
Message-ID: 4A42452F.1000707 () bobjweil ! com
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Michal Skrzypek wrote:
>     Dear LyX developers,
>
>     I have some question: I will soon need to write a paper in Polish,
> but currently there is no way of having "Theorem", "Proposition" and
> alike in Polish language other than translating layouts manually (or
> have I missed something?). What is the best approach to this task, i.e.
> how to do it universally, so that such a translation could later be
> integrated into LyX and into the future versions of layouts itself?
>
>     Some framework for doing so would be quite useful in my opinion,
> because as of now, it seems to me that all the names are hardcoded into
> layout files, which makes the work of maintaining them for different
> languages needlessly complicated.
>
>     Am I right in these observations? If so, are there any plans to
> solve this? It seems important, because as of now setting the language
> in the document has no effect for the generated documents, on the other
> hand, setting the language for the LyX interface seems to translate some
> names (still not all of them: "Axiom" for example is not trasnlated
> into Polish), but only in the LyX GUI - this is not happening in sync
> with the target document (why?), so everything has to be translated
> twice for the full effect.
>
There are two separable issues here. One is how things appear in LyX 
itself. The other is how the LaTeX output appears. So the answer to your 
last question is just that these are different.

As for LyX, the strings used in layout files are all translatable, but 
whether they have actually been translated is another matter. Our 
translators work hard, but it's not always easy to keep up, and we don't 
always have active translators for every language for which we have 
partial GUI translations. It appears from a quick look at the pl.po file 
that, as you mention, the label string for the axiom environment hasn't 
yet been translated. If you'd like to translate it, and anything else, 
we'd be happy to have it. Just check out the pl.po file, where you'll 
also find names and email addresses for the earlier contributors. The 
file can be edited with a simple text editor or with a GUI such as 
kbabel (for Linux) or poedit (http://www.poedit.net/), which is 
allegedly cross-platform. I'm sure there are lots more, too.

How things appear in LaTeX is an entirely different matter. The LaTeX 
babel package is supposed to handle this sort of thing, but it doesn't 
handle every environment one might introduce. The good news is that, 
thanks to work by Georg Baum, this sort of thing will be handled 
automatically in LyX 2.0. The bad news is that Georg's fixes cannot be 
backported to 1.6.x, because they change the format of the layout files. 
So for 1.6.x, you have to do things manually (as you would in straight 
LaTeX, too). See http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/I18nLabels for information on 
what needs doing, including detailed information on translating the AMS 
environments. The best thing to do would be to produce a set of modules
    theorems-ams-pl.module
    theorems-ams-extended-pl.module
that would encapsulate the relevant translations and then can be used 
whenever you need to write in Polish.

>     Not to mention, that switching language for LyX GUI has problems of
> its own. Changing the LANG variable gives a lot of warning messages
> about conflicting or non-existing keyboard shortcuts.
>
These are probably due to conflicts in the translation files, which 
again we'd love for you to fix.

Richard

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