Martin von Loewis wrote:
To simplify usage of Python for people who don't speak English well, I'd like to start a project translating the doc strings in the Python library. This has two aspects:
1. there must be a simple way to access the translated doc strings
Do you plan to use GNU gettext here ? (This would cause the translated version of Python to fall under GPL, AFAIK) I'd propose to use the existing doc-strings as keys to a translation mapping. This assures that existing doc-strings remain intact and that the actual translation process is done at query time, e.g. by using a help() built-in function.
2. there must be actual translations to the various native languages of Python users.
Since the second task is much more complicated, I submit a snapshot of this project, namely, a message catalog of the doc strings in the Python libraries, taken from the CVS; along with a snapshot of the German translations. I intend to complete the German translations in the coming weeks, but I want to give other translators a chance to also start working on that.
Please note that extracting the docstrings was not straight-forward; I've used François Pinard's most excellent po-utils 0.5 as a starting point, and enhanced it with the capability to recognize __doc__[] in C code, so that I would also get (most of) the doc strings in C modules. I plan to update this catalog a few times before Python 1.6 is released, so that translators can update their translations.
A key point is finding translators. I propose to use the infrastructure of the GNU translation project for that: There are established teams for all major languages, and an infrastructure (also maintained by François) where notifications about new catalogs are automatically distributed to the teams. That should not stop volunteers which don't currently participate in the GNU translation project from translating - however, they should announce that they plan to work on translating these messages to avoid duplication of work.
This will only work iff the translations can be submitted via the usual "post to patches with dislcaimer" method... aren't the GNU people interested in putting the translations under the GPL ?
Another matter is where the catalogs should live in the Python source tree. I propose to have a Misc/po directory, which will contain both the PO catalogues, as well as the binary .mo objects; only the latter will be installed during the installation process.
Please let me know what you think, in particular, whether I can submit the catalog to the translation teams.
Regards, Martin
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