State of the translation

Instead of making yet another silly tool, people should rather focus on existing systems (transifex/launchpad). Practically every other projects moved away from the tickets, manually uploading, pull requests system a long time ago to these. it's time xbmc do it too, but not in the form of yet another tool..

ventech Wrote:Instead of making yet another silly tool, people should rather focus on existing systems (transifex/launchpad). Practically every other projects moved away from the tickets, manually uploading, pull requests system a long time ago to these. it's time xbmc do it too, but not in the form of yet another tool..

I'm almost offended by you calling my efforts here silly, but I'll ignore it, maybe you're right.

Using existing systems would surely be the best way, it we get the systems to suit us.

Transifex looks quite good:

https://www.transifex.net/tour/features/translate/

http://help.transifex.net/features/formats.html

Launchpad only supports gnu gettext files? It looks good too, though.

https://launchpad.net/+tour/translation

I think we could easily build a "bridge" between xbmc string.xml files and gettext files so we can use these systems.

I have no idea if those systems provide the "translation memory", which surely is critical to the translation process.

Then there's the matter of plugins, where the changes need to be pushed to where ever the addon developers fo their development.

Any way it goes, I want to see the xbmc translation situation improve, a lot, and I'm willing to work on it. Be it silly or not.

I was also thinking of launchpad earlier, but the updating process of Enlish and back the translated strings would be a PITA and all up to xbmc devs and plugin devs to handle without the interaction, notice, help etc from the translator itself. That is not so a good way in my opinion.

That is why at this point I agree that a web based translation tool with automated pull push functionality looks quite good as it also helps xbmc devs life. And extjs seems powerful enough to handle it gui-wise.

Well, transifex happens to be completely open source and proven. you can host it at xbmc.org if you want. I'm just saying it might be good idea to look into it before reinventing transifex. I know some guy once said he would look into creating a xml plugin for it in some thread a while ago, but the thread just died..

ventech Wrote:Well, transifex happens to be completely open source and proven. you can host it at xbmc.org if you want. I'm just saying it might be good idea to look into it before reinventing transifex. I know some guy once said he would look into creating a xml plugin for it in some thread a while ago, but the thread just died..

Yes I looked into the docs and it seems to handle a whole lot of formats, including android xml.

I will take a look into it as it seems like a nice tool. Cleaner, better than launchpad maybe.

Also if it is open source, we can write a custom parser in case. It seems promising.

Yea I suggest it once: http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=665...stcount=24

ticket about string hint/help: http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/8047

Also Microsoft Terminology and Glossary site. This is really helping us for translations.
They collect all languages and strings used in Microsoft products
http://www.microsoft.com/language/en-us/default.aspx

Hm, http://help.transifex.net/server/install.html doesn't look too daunting... Maybe I'll take a look at this and see how it could be integrated with the xbmc, i.e. strings.xml files and even the git backend.

If this is the way to go, there's the matter of having the server... Transifex is python and forum, wiki and xbmc.org (wordpress?) are php, so I'm not sure what whoever is responsible for mainaining xbmc server thinks about it. But it probably could be hosted elsewhere too. For starters I'll put it to my free amazon ec2 machine, unfortunately though I'll run out of the free 12 months pretty soon.

Also, with xbmc being a widely recognized, successful open source project, if we run into issues, I'm sure we can get help from the makers of transifex.

Edit: I was slow - should have checked the thread before hitting submit

queeup Wrote:Yea I suggest it once: http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=665...stcount=24
ticket about string hint/help: http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/8047

Yes context hints is a main and first official target from the team XBMC, which task I was assigned from Jonathan. The reason I am also looking at the future solution is to make this context hints in a proper format what we can use with the new translation method. (namely as xml attributes or normal xml comments)

Hosting it won't be a problem. Once you have evaluated it's efficacy for the rule, drop us a line and we'd be quite happy to host it (and help you with any access you need etc.)

Great initiative

Cheers,
Jonathan

jmarshall Wrote:Hosting it won't be a problem. Once you have evaluated it's efficacy for the rule, drop us a line and we'd be quite happy to host it (and help you with any access you need etc.)

Great initiative

Cheers,
Jonathan

Thanks Jonathan !

With the help of Viljo and possibly others who want to contribute, we'll get to the end of this. Thanks for the support :-)