TRANSLATING (3611B) - raw
1 =============================================================================== 2 Translating Mail Notification 3 =============================================================================== 4 5 Index 6 7 0. About this document 8 1. Correctness 9 2. Starting up 10 3. Comments 11 4. Formatting 12 5. Capitalization 13 6. Context 14 7. Access keys 15 8. Application name 16 17 0. About this document 18 19 $Id: TRANSLATING,v 1.7 2008-01-04 15:38:21 jylefort Exp $ 20 21 Copyright (C) 2005-2008 Jean-Yves Lefort. 22 23 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this 24 document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License 25 (GFDL), Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free 26 Software Foundation with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover 27 Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. You can find a copy of the 28 GFDL at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html or in the file 29 COPYING-DOCS distributed with this manual. 30 31 1. Correctness 32 33 To translate Mail Notification, you should have a good 34 understanding of the English language, and excellent writing 35 skills in the target language. Grammatical, spelling and 36 semantic errors should be avoided as much as possible. 37 38 2. Starting up 39 40 To generate a new .po template, type the following commands: 41 42 cd po 43 intltool-update -p 44 msginit -l LL_CC 45 46 LL must be a language code, and CC must be a country code, for 47 instance: 48 49 msginit -l it_IT 50 51 Consult the gettext and intltool documentation for more 52 informations. 53 54 3. Comments 55 56 Translator hints are prefixed with "translators:". Other 57 comments must be ignored (the extraction tools blindly copy 58 source code comments which precede translatable messages). 59 60 4. Formatting 61 62 Newlines (\n) must be preserved. Formatting elements must be 63 copied literally, but their content must be translated. For 64 instance, the message: 65 66 <span weight="bold">Fonts</span> 67 68 translates to French as: 69 70 <span weight="bold">Polices de caractères</span> 71 72 5. Capitalization 73 74 Mail Notification follows the GNOME capitalization guidelines: 75 76 http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/design-text-labels.html#layout-capitalization 77 78 Messages which use header capitalization are marked with the 79 comment "translators: header capitalization". The header 80 capitalization rule of the target language, if any, must be 81 applied to these messages. 82 83 6. Context 84 85 Some messages are prefixed with context information (separated 86 from the actual message by the pipe character, "|"), for 87 instance: 88 89 msgid "icon tooltip's mail summary layout|Co_mpact" 90 91 The purpose of the context information is to allow different 92 translations of the same English message. The context must be 93 removed from the translations, as in: 94 95 msgid "icon tooltip's mail summary layout|Co_mpact" 96 msgstr "_Compact" 97 98 msgid "popup's mail summary layout|Co_mpact" 99 msgstr "_Compacte" 100 101 7. Access keys 102 103 Characters following an underline are access keys. The user 104 can activate the control labelled by the message by pressing 105 Alt-x, where x is the character following the underline. 106 107 When a message contains an access key, assign an appropriate 108 access key to the translation by consulting the "Choosing 109 Access Keys" section of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines: 110 111 http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/input-keyboard.html#choosing-access-keys 112 113 8. Application name 114 115 The application name ("Mail Notification") should be 116 translated. For historical reasons, in English, it is treated 117 as a proper noun and capitalized accordingly. However, in the 118 target language, it should be translated as a common noun 119 (such as "the washing machine" or "the mail notifier").