[spambayes-dev] Re: [Spambayes] RV: I18N and L10N

[Richie Hindle]

Pablo,

[Moving this thread to spambayes-dev at python.org]

> All right, third try, then I'll quit :-)

Our apologies - we don't mean to ignore people who offer to help - far
from it!

> I just want to ask if there's any interest
> at all in having Spambayes available in Spanish or not.

We'd love to have international versions, though there are a lot of issues
involved.  I don't mean to put you off the idea, or to imply that we're
not prepared to put effort into this, but these things need taking into
account...

Many (most?) of the English strings in SpamBayes are mixed in with the
code.  Taking the source code as it is an translating the strings into
Spanish would be unmaintainable - we'd have two entirely separate versions
of the code, and any edits would have to be applied to both.  So the first
job to do would be to pull out all those hard-coded strings into a
language file.  That's not a huge job, and one that any computer-literate
person could probably do 95% of, even if they weren't a programmer.  Still
more effort than simply translating a collection of English phrases into
Spanish, though.

More English text appears in HTML pages.  Some of these are mostly text,
like the Outlook help pages, and maintaining two versions would not be too
bad (though any stylistic changes might have to be applied twice).  Some,
however, are quite strictly defined in ways that makes them
machine-readable - the web interface (as used by the POP3 proxy and IMAP
filter) defines its user interface in little pieces of HTML that are
joined together by the program at runtime.  Translating that stuff would
need more technical knowledge, and probably a significant amount of
re-engineering to make it maintainable.

A lot of Outlook interface (at least the dialogs) are defined in Windows
resource files, which require Visual Studio to edit them (or there may be
third party programs to it - any free ones that people know of?).  You can
edit them by hand but it's a huge pain.  They also contain a lot of
information that's not just language strings, meaning there's a lot of
duplication between the different language versions that causes
maintenance headaches.  I'd be interested to hear from people out there in
the world with solutions to this problem!

Lastly a social issue.  You could become the support department for
hundred of Spanish SpamBayes users!

So.  Do you still want to do this?  8-)  And are there SpamBayes
developers (or other Python-literate SpamBayes users - Pablo, you don't
say whether you're a Python programmer?) who have the time to make the
necessary software changes for this to work?

There may be other, cheaper, alternatives to doing the work that I haven't
considered (for instance, translating all the strings in place and then
maintaining the edits as a set of patches that get applied to each release
- are there Open Source projects that work that way?)

I may be painting an unnecessarily bleak picture here, because I'm no
expert on i18n.  I'd love for someone to come in and say "No, you've got
it all wrong, it's easy, look!"  Anyone?

-- 
Richie Hindle
richie at entrian.com