Re: [widgets] Further argument for making config.xml mandatory

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 5:07 PM,  <Jere.Kapyaho@nokia.com> wrote:
> The reason why the I18N BP document frowns upon this is because if you have
> the material sent for translation, it might (or most probably will) be
> translated by different people in different places. So it makes coordination
> a little difficult when all the different language texts are in the same
> file. That is a big problem if you have substantial amounts of text in the
> file. In the case of widgets, there might not be such huge amounts of text
> in the config file, so that’s a mitigating circumstance for this horrible
> negligence. :-)

I see.

> Let’s assess how much translatable text there would be in a config file in
> the worst case, and then decide if we know well enough to break the best
> practice or not.
>
> Marcos came up with the following list:
>
> The following elements would be localizable:
>
> widget (but no id or version, derived from root config, if available)
>  name
>  description
>  author
>  license
>  icon
>  content
>  preference
>  screenshot
>
> (BTW Marcos, are you sure “content” and “preference” should be there? Also
> maybe author should be dropped. License I can understand, but probably not
> to be used to present different versions of a license, just translations of
> the same license.)

I'm ok to drop author.

Content I think we should keep because you might need different start
files for different langs to achieve particular layouts.

Preferences i don't feel too strongly about, but I can see use cases
for having localized preferences.

License, I agree, but there is obviously no way to check if it is a
translation, but we could certainly put in a Authoring Guideline.

> All of these seem to have a fairly limited amount of translatable /
> localizable content, so would the ease of processing and the general
> simplification warrant the possible inconvenience in having the text
> translated? The license seems to be the biggest block of translatable text,
> and therefore potentially the biggest problem.

I guess as it is one element, it should not bee too much drama.

> (NOTE: A system for widget authoring that is connected to the back-end of
> the vendor’s translation memory / CMS could generate the config file
> automatically, eliminating the need to translate the actual config files by
> hand. Translations and other localized material can be assembled into the
> CMS prior to generating the config file.)

Agreed.


-- 
Marcos Caceres
http://datadriven.com.au

Received on Thursday, 19 March 2009 16:22:02 UTC