Hello,
here is a proposal to help translators's job:
handle translated tags via PO files (i.e. gettext) instead of slices
It only applies to english/template/debian/*.wml files; other l10n-ed
tag definitions, as in ports/menu.defs, may follow this scheme later.
There is no need to change all files simultaneously since slice
machinery is always available.
In practice,
<define-tag yes whitespace=delete>
[EN:Yes:]
[AR:äÚã:]
...
[TR:Evet:]
[ZH:¬O:]
</define-tag>
is replaced by
<define-tag yes whitespace=delete>
<gettext>Yes</gettext>
</define-tag>
WML could then replace strings by looking into message catalogs, with
gettext bindings. If string is not translated, English text is
returned, which is exactly what we want.
Advantages:
* Languages are no more mixed in input files, so encoding issues
should be solved
* Translatable strings can be automatically extracted, thus
translators do no more have to keep an eye on commits for templates
* Translators cannot break templates (unless they forgot to close
some tags in their translations)
* Processed files are smaller, so build should run faster
* When a string is updated by a translator, only a single language
has to be rebuilt
Drawbacks:
* Requires a not-yet released mp4h version. It could have been done
with pass 3 (eperl), but it would have been much trickier and more
fragile.
* Locales will surely give some surprise
If there is no objection, I will add a new directory
webwml/po/template/debian/ with the modified templates files, and the
PO files containing current translations. This will be experimental,
in order to show how it works. When it is ready,
webwml/english/template/debian/ is updated and webwml/po could be
entirely removed.
Denis
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