[Mailman-i18n] I wanna join in Brazilian Portuguese Translation Team.

[Barry A. Warsaw]

I'm just starting to get my head above water, so I hope I'll do some
catching up to the various lists over the next few days.

>>>>> "DT" == Danny Terweij <danny@terweij.nl> writes:

    >> But I have try to contact anyone of then and didn't recieved
    >> any answer.

    DT> I did also many times contact the Dutch translator, but like
    DT> you .. no answers.

    DT> Maybe the Mailman crew can do an update to the translators and
    DT> if they not respond within a time then the translator must be
    DT> removed from the translation list.

We just did this with the Spanish translations, albeit with the
approval of the previous and next Spanish translator (I haven't
updated the info yet though!).

Please!  If any translators for your language are unreachable and you
want to take over, let me know.  If I can't contact them, I will make
you the champion.

On a wider note, perhaps we're going about this all wrong and we
should migrate to The Translation Project for management of the MM
translations?  I'm all ears for hearing about how to make your jobs
easier.

    DT> I do not know how to translate, but i am now translate the
    DT> Mailman 2.1 EN templates to Dutch and also all the *.py code
    DT> translating all to Dutch. This is a hell of a job!!

Yeah, I haven't shamed my Dutch coworkers Guido and Martijn into doing
it yet. :)  Or Thomas Wouters for that matter. :)

Ok, is it a "hell of a job" because it's just a lot of work, or
because there are real obstacles in your way that we can help improve?
Note that there are several experienced translators on this list for
other languages.  Perhaps things are easier for them because they're
Emacs users and your not?  I know Emacs has a translation mode
(po-mode) that makes life a lot easier.

    DT> Why is Mailman developed such way? it was easyer to work with
    DT> language variables at the sourcecode of the *.py files.

    | Like files ;
    | /languages/language.en
    | /languages/language.nl
    | /languages/language.fr
    | /languages/language.default

    | Example:
    | language.en
    | mailinglist="Mailinglist"
    | archive="Archive"

    | language.nl
    | mailinglist="Mailinglijst"
    | achive="Achief"

    DT> And when there is a missing parameter then the
    DT> language.default entry is taken.  But all the source code must
    DT> be rewritten for it.. so i do not think this will be done at
    DT> this way by developers.

No, we have done things this way.  I believe what you're suggesting is
to use explicit message ids in the source code instead of implicitly
using the English source text as the message id.  Think catgets
vs. gettext APIs.

There are trade-offs to each approach, and neither is perfect.  We
decided to go the gettext route (i.e. implicit message ids) because it
makes the source code much more readable, and it doesn't require us to
provide an English catalog.  Because translation services will
fallback to the message id when it can't find a translation for a
particular string, I suspect Mailman is much more useable when a
language is only partly translated.

Note that you don't have to do the entire translation before you
submit stuff to me to be checked in!  You can translate the templates
separately from the message catalog.  Or translate the catalog in bits
and pieces, sending me updates when you have them ready.  That way I
can commit partial Dutch or Portuguese translations for use and
testing by others, and we don't lose all your efforts if you drop off
the face of the earth (like I've just done ;).

So if you have translations in the works, feel free to send them to
me.  "Release early and often" applies here too. (well not /too/ often
:).

    DT> I am not a linux user first degree, i am only use linux
    DT> because some software is just better than M$.  I did not find
    DT> a mailinglist manager with a graphical web interface for
    DT> win32....

So is the problem that there aren't great translation tools for
Windows or non-Emacs geeks?  I wish I could help more here, but I'm
not aware of any either.  However, some of the work Stephan Richter
has been doing on the recent Zope3 i18n project might (eventually)
serve as a web based platform for translations.

You might find this a useful resource as well:

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/

Cheers,
-Barry