Re: localization of Grub

[Carles Pina i Estany]

Hello,

On Sep/29/2008, Vesa Jääskeläinen wrote:
> Robert Millan wrote:
> > On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 11:49:54PM +0200, Carles Pina i Estany wrote:
> >>>   - gettextise the util tools, so they can be translated as normal
> >>>   programs.
> >> ok! (I guess/hope that will be more "burocratic" work than new work)
> > 
> > It _is_ technical work I think, but less fun than the other part :-/
> > 
> >> I don't expect to have time until 22th October (aprox.). I have more
> >> interest in the second part (it's "newer") than first part, but first
> >> part has a practical and fast effects with (I think) less investment.
> > 
> > The second part also builds on the first, to some extent.  I.e. if you want
> > to test gettext support in GRUB itself, you need some strings to translate,
> > and these are provided by the .mo files which are only built if the build
> > system supports that, etc.
> 
> Before you guy's go too deep in detail I would like to remind special
> requirements for graphical user interface related to localization.

first step (as long as I understood from Robert) would be adding
localization (say... gettext support) to everything under grub2/util .

This is userspace and I hope that standard gettext will be enough for
there. What do you think? (I hope that will be enough because gettext is
used in lot of places, even when I cannot find any RTL support after a
fast Googling :-( )

> You can't just printf stuff to screen in there. There has to be some
> changes in logic how information is presented to user. Currently there
> is lot of printf's in the code to display information and that is not
> going to be too pretty for graphical menu as we need to display some
> kind of console on event when there is something to be displayed.

well, I think that this printf's will not look pretty in any language (I
mean, it's not a localization problem)

> Also try to think how different languages differentiate for displaying
> certain types of information. Here is some simple example. (Bear in mind
> if there are grammatical errors or typos or so :))
> 
> (eng) "See Figure 2 in page 14 for more details.' -> (fin) "Sivulla 14
> olevassa kuvassa 2 on enemmän tietoa asiasta.'
> 
> Please notice difference in order of arguments in the languages.

gettext supports it

> Also there are some weird scripts that change order of characters. In
> example for some right-to-left scripts seem to have this feature. On
> example that I think belongs to this group is hebrew where they normally
> write from right-to-left, but for English (or foreign) texts are still
> visually correct.
> 
> In example:
> "<native>This is native 1</native><english>2and this is
> English3</english><native>4, so weird.</native>"
> 
> Would be something like:
> ".rdiew os ,42and this is English31 evitan si sihT"
> 
> So this subject really has more details than meets the eye in first
> sight :)

RTL problem is more about presentation, no? I will check how other
programs do it. If the hebrew translator writes the correct translated
string in the .po we will have it in Grub... but the alignment would be
incorrect. It would look, for Left to Right people, like having
everything aligned to the right.

-- 
Carles Pina i Estany            GPG id: 0x17756391
        http://pinux.info