[PyQt] i18n

[Giovanni Bajo]

On mer, 2009-02-11 at 12:32 -0800, Kovid Goyal wrote:
> On Wednesday 11 February 2009 12:05:13 you wrote:
> > On 2/11/2009 8:14 PM, Kovid Goyal wrote:
> > You'll be hard-pressed to find a Windows translation program better than
> > Linguist. Do you have any suggestion? Did you personally evaluate
> > Linguist and are aware of its features?
> >
> > (OK, Linguist can now import .po files too, but then I don't see the
> > point of using an external translation package).
> 
> The critical thing in open source projects is to make it as easy as possible 
> for volunteers to contribute translations. Launchpad allows you to have a 
> simple web based interface where they can contribute translated strings 
> easily. Plus it suggests translations for frequently used strings across its 
> entire database of available translations. 

Sure, but "open-source" doesn't say it all. I appreciate Launchpad very
much, but in a business environment translations are carried on by
professionals, so it's less important to manage 200 volunteers
translating a couple of sentence each one at random times.

I'm not saying that your suggestion of using gettext is totally wrong:
it's surely an option to consider. But there are advantages in the Qt
translation toolchain too.

> > Plus I'm not sure gettext has the advanced plural support (does it?).
> >
> 
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/gettext/Plural-forms.html

Thanks for the pointer.

> > > This has the additional advantage of not tying in your translation
> > > infrastructure to a graphical toolkit.
> >
> > Given how simple is to batch-substitute tr() to _() (so simple that
> > you're even suggesting it yourself), I don't really see a point here.
> > Converting the whole application to another toolkit would probably be
> > much harder in the first place.
> 
> What if your application has many parts, only some of which need a graphical 
> toolkit. 

Yes, this can be an issue. It's less problematic in C++, where you'd die
for using QtCore everywhere you're allowed too anyway and thus have the
translation functions available, but Python doesn't need it (mostly).

I usually put workarounds in place to be able to use Qt's translation in
the Qt-agnostic packages within a Qt-based application, but I agree that
it is somewhat a problem.

> What if you want to write different GUIs for different contexts? 

Different GUI with the same texts and thus reusing the same translation?
Do you happen to know a single open source project that does this?
-- 
Giovanni Bajo
Develer S.r.l.
http://www.develer.com