FIltering out languages via kickstart

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hi Michael,

On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 7:29 AM, Michael Stone<michael at laptop.org> wrote:
> Sayamindu,
>
> I like your answer but I think that it leaves some important goals unstated
> --
> most notably, click2trans, horizontal distribution of translations, and
> translation undo.
>
> See http://cscott.net/Publications/OLPC/fudcon-i18n.pdf and
> http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-June/015838.html for the
> writeups and
> http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/cscott/click2trans for the prototype code.
>
> Thoughts?
>

One of the main requirements of the features outlined in Scott's
presentation (especially click2trans) is the ability to have
translations which are editable by the non-root user. I think storing
translations in $HOME addresses that.

The ability to edit will definitely necessitate a "Undo" function, and
the first step towards that would be store a copy of the original
translation pack somewhere locally (version control is another
possibility, but I would probably try to avoid more than what I can
chew at the moment :-).
Another very important aspect is to try to ensure the validity of
individual messages as they get translated (eg: making sure that "%s
foo" is translated as "%s bar", and not simply as "bar" or "%z bar").
This validation can be done by libgettextpo, and I have been slowly
working on python bindings for this
(http://code.google.com/p/pygettextpo/).

Regarding distribution of translations, apart from click2trans, we can
also have an activity like Develop which would enable users to
translate activities, as well as share translations and translation
memories. In this regard, Google's recently announced translator
toolkit might provide some inspirations :-)
(http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/translating-worlds-information-with.html)


Thanks,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]