[wp-polyglots] Tips for translating with Rosetta

[K Suominen]

I think you are misunderstanding.

The problem you are describing is solved by using entities in the po
file, on which there is no disagreement.

I just find it quite impractical (I'd like to say "impossible") to
enter the translations using entities as opposed to typing the
appropriate keys on my keyboard.

For example, if I need to translate "today", I could just type
"tänään" (in ISO-8859-1) on my keyboard.  There is a dedicated key for
"ä" on it.  Using entities, I'd have to type
"t&adiaeresis;n&adiaeresis;&adiaeresis;n".  Not exactly a natural way
of working...

So my proposal is that e.g. for the Finnish translation, we choose
ISO-8859-1 as the character set to use while translating the strings. 
Then we use PHP (or Perl or sed, even) to encode the strings to using
entities (e.g. using the htmlentities() function).  This is perfectly
doable since we *know* the character set used for the translation
project for Finnish (i.e. that all messages are ISO-8859-1).

Since the distributed translation (processed through the script) has
only entities, not 8-bit characters, it is safe to use with any
character set.

Regards,
+ Kim


On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 14:52:00 +0000 (GMT), Xavier Borderie
<xibe at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Would it be possible to agree on a character set
> > used in the
> > translation project, and then convert the message to
> > use entities when
> > compiling the distributed po file?
> 
> I think we can't, 'cos that would mean the user has to
> use that same set (let's say utf-8)... and some of
> them, for instance, imported their blog from a former
> system, which uses a differente set (oooh, iso-8859-1
> sounds fitting). They would then have to convert all
> their former post.
> Plus a host of other reasons. I guess.
> I used to compile two versions of fr_FR, but that's
> not good practice, I think. Yes, entering the entities
> by hand is a pain, but in the end everybody wins.
> 
> But as the song says, I might be wrong, 'cos IANWPD (I
> Am Not A WordPress Developer), so YMMV, AFAIK.
> 
> =====
> x.
> 
> 
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