Hi
Babel-dev
My name is Morten Nilsen and I manage a group of people in Adobe Systems Inc
which creates a Japanese version of Flex Builder. I was referred to this alias
by Wayne Beaton and Donald Smith. Since Flex Builder is dependent on Eclipse we
are looking to explore the possibility of how we can contribute to the effort
of localizing Eclipse and its langpack into Japanese.
We are currently building Flex Builder on the Eclipse 3.3 platform. As no
current 3.3 language pack is yet available we have been creating and using a
modified 3.2.1 language pack to meet our Japanese translation needs. We needed
to make a number of minor manual changes to the 3.2.1 language packs in the end
game as the core code UI locked down. This turned out to be a time
consuming and sometime error prone effort. We’d like to avoid this method
in the future and also share our work and efforts with the Eclipse community.
We’d like to explore how we could automate a process whereby we access
directly your latest file sets for all localizable components (Eclipse localizable
source files .properties) for the next upcoming Eclipse version. With direct
access to the localizable source files, we can set up our system to
automatically retrieve these files, detect the changes and send these changes
out quickly for translation. We would then be able to submit the
completed translation back to the Eclipse source tree. This could be done on an
ongoing basis during the development process.
Using an automated method like this would also allow for other languages to be
done the same way in the future. We (Adobe) would like to propose that we could
take on the Japanese translation for all localizable UI components and
documentation assuming we can automate how we get and push files back and forth
for the next version of Eclipse (3.4).
Having followed the new developments under the Babel project we are aware of
the system you are about to publish there, but it’s seems more aimed at
many translators doing small parts rather than one party taking on a whole
language. However this may be just our lack of knowledge regarding your system
for community translation and how this system works.
We would like to set up a meeting to discuss these ideas, weigh some pros and
cons, and find a role for ourselves in the Babel project which would serve your
needs as well as ours.
Thanks,
Morten
Nilsen & team
