Notes from Babel Project BOF – March 19, 2008

Types of Editors:

 

  1. Translation Server Demo
    1. How can a contributor tell whether or not the translation string is applicable for all versions of Eclipse when translating?
      1. We should verify this before translating
    1. How does a user download and install a new language pack?
      1. ISSUE:
        1. In the future we will bundle up only the plugins that they need – we currently force people to download all projects
          1. I.e. WTP Russian language pack by itself
    1. What kind of infrastructure is behind the Babel Translation Server?
      1. User wants to include another open source project
    1. Quality Control – Ideas:
      1. RSS feed – you can find out what happened to your language
        1. Have a team to vote on translations or revert bad translations, etc
        2. Committers or maybe someone that has been doing a lot of work, we can vote someone as a champion of that language
      2. Dictionary of words that have already been translated by other people. This will create a sense of consistency
      3. Wikipedia.org system
      4. Talk to Localization Groups (from Eclipse Foundation)
    1. Can people request different languages to be translated?
      1. Open a bug
  1. Runtime Editor Demo
    1. Where do the translation strings go?
      1. Goes into a delta file which should (in the future) go to the Babel server
        1. idea is that the end user should not know where the delta file is
        2. ISSUE: what if a translator using this editor doesn’t have internet?
          1. Maybe create a function to do that
          2. If you hover over the key (in the dialogue box) the path will appear for the file
          3. Export translations (Maylan code)
  1. Message Editor
    1. Used to edit all Property files
    2. Really helpful for programmers
    3. Only one language will be displayed at a time (from English)
    4. ISSUE:
      1. The key being translated doesn’t show the context of each key
        1. This makes it hard to actually do the translation
          1. We need some type of UI to traces the key back to the code or give information on that particular string
  1. MISC Items:
    1. ISSUE: Incentives for people to join/help
      1. We need to come up w/ some type of system to give people incentive to help and contribute
    1. Strings NOT to be translated
      1. Create a UI to show which strings not to translate
      2. Should bring up a wizard to externalize the string
        1. Helps you figure out which ones being with a %
    1. Add Notification to show which strings that were already translated have been changed
    2. IBM has translation tools for 3.3
      1. We want the Open Source community to help and start this project and develop the tools we need
      2. We don’t want to be reliant on any one company

 

TO FIND OUT MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE GO TO:

www.Eclipse.org/babel

  1. Contact us at the newsgroup
  2. Look at our bugs
  3. Open new bugs
  4. Translate