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

[Pablo Vieira]

Wow, looks challenging, but very interesting! I'm not a Python programmer
but I'm a C programmer and learning Java right now. I'll join you guys at
the developers list. I might have some suggestions.

Thanks for answering, finally! ;-)

Pablo

> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: Richie Hindle [mailto:richie at entrian.com]
> Enviado el: sábado, 15 de noviembre de 2003 17:57
> Para: Pablo Vieira; spambayes at python.org; spambayes-dev at python.org
> Asunto: Re: [Spambayes] RV: I18N and L10N
> 
> 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
> 
>