Doing the translation job

So, in the last days I was pretty stressed, not only because of my job but also because I had a lot of fights caused by stuff like KDE’s split ebuilds dependencies and similar. Stupid things, but seems like people like to blame me for anything that does not work in the herd I’m in. I don’ actually know why.

Because of that I needed to find something that relaxed me and at the same time made me useful to someone, I like being useful to others, although I know this is a selfish feelings. There’s nothing more selfish than wanting to be appreciated for the job one does.

For this reason, as Tony (Chainsaw) reminded me last week that I am good at something else a part developing, and that is translating, I decided to spend some more time on translations. In particular, after updating Audacious’s Italian translation and adding unieject’s Italian translation (other languages are always welcoem of course), I decided to look at other software I’m tied to, in this case, xine-lib, that I re-snapshotted today. The language file is very very old, not updated since 2003, which means quite a lot of time now. I started this afternoon by fixing the fuzzy entries, and then I continued adding the new entries.

Lots of text in that language file, because there are also the explanation of the various settings, not a simple work at all, and the fact that xine changed almost entirely in the last three years didn’t really help 🙂 I’m now at about 300 untranslated messages to complete before sending it upstream for good. After that, I’ll be fixing the few messages missing in xine-ui (I’ll probably take a CVS snapshot just to see how it is, as it’s been a while since last release of that, too, and I want to know if they did change something important or interesting, so I hope there won’t be much more translation to do on CVS), and then look for something else. I might end up updating VLC’s translation, but it has 1208 fuzzy messages, and about 500 untranslated strings, which means that there is a lot to work to do for it (although it might even be the best thing, as that is used by many friends of mine already, I might help them).

There’s actually another reason on all this, and it is that if i can move more people to use Free Software it would be better for me, and as a big part of the people I know here does not know English very well, having a working Italian translation would really help.
Too bad that portage isn’t internationalized 😛 It could have been a good GSoC project, although I think portage team now will hate me for thinking of this 😉 Well if they need some help for that, I’m ready to help them of course.

Of course I take care only of Italian translations because that’s what I know, but I would be happy to see someone completing other languages’ translations of xine-lib and xine-ui and so on. So if you have some time, you speak a language different from English, and want to help improving Free Software, emerge kbabel, read the little documentation that’s related to it, and look for xine-lib and xine-ui .pot files (or to uncomplete already present translation). Then you can send them upstream, or in case of xine you can even just send it to me and I’ll send it upstream in your name; if I end up receiving a few of those translation I might even end up taking separated snapshots of the po/ dir after some are merged, so that the version in Gentoo would support more languages.

i18n++ i18n++!

(and on this note, I should probably research ruby-gettext to make gitarella internationalized, too!)