[jboss-l10n] JBoss Portal and Ant-Gettext (was JBoss Tools L10n - help wanted!)

[Sean Flanigan]

Thomas Heute wrote:
> Sean,
> 
>  From what i've gathered:
> 	- PO is good for editing

Yep, compared to .properties, at least.  With PO, the translator can see
the original English and the translation in the same file, which (a)
should make translation easier and (b) makes it possible to guarantee
that translations are updated when the English is.

With .properties, if someone edits the English messages.properties file
and changes a string, they may invalidate the messages_ja.properties,
messages_de.properties, etc etc.  You can only tell this has happened by
browsing the SVN change history.  Java will happily keep using the
outdated translations.

And PO has translation editors like KBabel, Lokalize, POEdit, an emacs
mode.  They're pretty primitive compared to commercial translation tools
(so I'm told), but they're a lot better than the .properties editors
I've seen.

> 	- .properties are good for programming (faster from what i heard and 
> less verbose)

Well, I tend to go with .properties because the Java runtimes
ResourceBundle and Eclipse's NLS both expect .properties, and I didn't
want to mess with these APIs.  I doubt that .properties are appreciably
faster on a modern machine, but they probably do save little disk space.
 In Gettext/C land, they compile PO to MO for runtime, for much the same
reason.

Now that I think about it, there could be some good arguments to try PO
as a runtime format.  I might try an experiment one day...

You shouldn't give me ideas.

> I see that you've build a Properties to PO tool, but how do you go back 
> to properties ? I'm not sure if you've built a tool to migrate or to be 
> used back and forth (bi-directional).

They're both there, just shielded by a cloak of bad documentation.  It's
definitely meant to be two-way.  Quoting myself from the Tennera wiki [1]:

# Gettext2PropTask (gettext2prop) is like 'po2prop' or 'msgcat
--properties-output', except that it generates a directory tree of
.properties from each PO file (one per locale).

That's a terrible description, because you have to know msgcat or
po2prop, but yes, it converts a PO file back into .properties.


> I'm definitely interested by such tools for JBoss Portal.

Well these tools were specifically written for JBoss [2], so let me know
what you need!  I'm keen to see them put to good use.

Regards

Sean.

[1] https://fedorahosted.org/tennera/wiki/WikiStart
[2] prop2pot, prop2po and po2prop were written to be cut-down, pure Java
equivalents for the gettext tools, so that they could be integrated into
a JBoss build.  prop2gettext and gettext2prop came along when it was
obvious that mapping hundreds of .properties to hundreds of PO files was
terrible for translators.


> Thomas
> 
> 
> Sean Flanigan wrote:
>> G'day,
>>
>> I've been working on some translation infrastructure for JBoss Tools.
>>
>> I'm pleased to report that we've already got some Japanese translations
>> for JBoss Tools, courtesy of a contribution by Shinobu Nogami.  Any help
>> with reviewing, correcting, or completing these translations would be
>> appreciated!  Translations for other languages would be great too.
>>
>> My build scripts for jbosstools-l10n use Tennera Ant-Gettext to convert
>> between .properties files (ResourceBundles) in the Java source code and
>> Gettext PO/POT files.  A bit like Translate Toolkit's prop2po but with
>> one important difference: an entire directory tree of properties files
>> can be reduced to a single POT file (not a tree of POT files).
>>
>> I hope this will make life easier for translators, since dealing with
>> hundreds of .properties files is hard enough in a good developer's IDE.
>>  From what I've seen, the open source translation editors just aren't
>> that good at dealing with lots of small files efficiently.  I'm not
>> familiar with any commercial translation tools, but I don't think many
>> of them would edit .properties files directly - they would convert to
>> another file format, or a database).
>>
>> PO files have their flaws, but they're still a big improvement over
>> .properties for L10n purposes, and they are what the Red Hat L10n team
>> mostly uses in current translation workflows (as I understand it).
>>
>> Anyway, the POT templates for JBoss Tools 3.1, and also the Japanese PO
>> files, are currently living in a Mercurial repository here:
>> http://bitbucket.org/seanf/jbosstools-l10n/ (Obviously, that's not meant
>> to be the permanent location!  And I'm not married to Mercurial, though
>> having a DVCS would be nice.)
>>
>> Ultimately, I suggest these particular translations should probably live
>> somewhere like this:
>> http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/jboss-l10n/jbosstools/3.1 [or maybe
>> .../trunk]
>>
>> But where to host them is the subject of my other post...
>>
>> Sean.
-- 
Sean Flanigan

Senior Software Engineer
Engineering - Internationalisation
Red Hat

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