Re: Website translation

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi,

"pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de> skribis:

> 3) We could write our own PO file writer and MO file reader and use it
> with either Christopher’s lego translation and sirgazil’s format
> strings to use whatever format we want for developers and translators.

Note that “lego translation” is what we should _not_ do because it gives
translators fragments of sentences, which does not allow them to
correctly translate text.

As long as we use xgettext, we have to stick to a format-string-like
approach like what sirgazil proposes.

Writing a custom xgettext kind of tool wouldn’t help much because
gettext is fundamentally text oriented: you give it a string and it
returns a string.

So I think the alternative is:

  • use gettext, and in that case stick to a format-string-like
    mechanism, or:

  • use a completely new tool that would be able to consume and produce
    sexps (trees).

The latter doesn’t seem reasonable to me.  :-)

BTW, there might also be ideas to borrow from GNUN:

  https://www.gnu.org/software/gnun/

Thanks,
Ludo’.