Wow this thread picked up steam today. :-) To comment on all the replies to date so far, in no particular order: 1) I freely admit that my knowledge of PO files is virtually nill. I suppose they could serve as the delivery file format, but how many developers know a PO editor? I'd never even heard of one until about 2 weeks ago, but have been writing PHP for over 5 years. Amazon insists that the Docs team will be writing all or nearly all of the help text anyway, but I still believe we should make it as easy as possible for non-Docs Team developers to write their own help text. Remember, not all Drupal modules end up on drupal.org! I mention XML as an alternative because developers are far more likely to know XML than PO, I think. 2) I wasn't aware of the way in which translations are cached now. If, as Khalid suggested, we could modify t() to handle lookups using a short key as well as the full English text, perhaps we could leverage the existing cache mechanism and let it do whatever it does? That would be necessary to achieve the goal of getting big blocks o' text out of the .module file, as well as making the matching faster (see next). 3) The statement that very-long string PO lookups is slow is based on comments killes made in the aforementioned IRC discussion. I will take his word on it unless someone can show otherwise. :-) 4) I firmly believe that any new help system should be designed in such a way as to encourage developers to provide context sensitive help. Even if most of the context sensitive help *text* is written by the Docs and Translation teams, developers should be encouraged to include the hooks for it in the first place. I suspect they'll want to provide at least an effort at text for it, if only to not ship code that reads "help goes here", so again some developer-friendly way of creating said text should be included. Again, that's especially important for non-drupal.org modules that the Docs and Translation teams won't get a crack at either way. On Sunday 25 September 2005 10:48 am, Gabor Hojtsy wrote:
I don't think there is any need to abandon PO as a format for translators to work in. My main point was that if the text is going to be moved to the database (as per the original suggestion) then an online translation tool is an obvious next step (see below). We would have to write import code to import the existing translations anyhow!
As for XML, I just wanted to point out that a standard already exists, and we should avoid making up our own (if we choose to support XML import/export) unless there are good reasons. I don't have much knowledge (or opinions) about about PO vs. XLIFF, but http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2003-October/msg00032.html seems to have some interesting points.
Seems like you really don't know how things are done now. We already store translation strings in the database, in fact original English strings are stored a multitude of times along with translations. And then we already have an import/export facility for PO files. Note that once we started to support PO files (instead of using a web interface), the number of translations dramatically increased, very much passing our expectations.
The fact that XLIFF might be better for someone then PO (explained on the link you posted up here), does not mean it is better for us. Someone who knows both need to do a comparision. Show us the needs in Drupal which XLIFF fulfills, and are not possible with PO files.
What is not possible now? What is going to be better?
I think you explained it yourself in your first paragraph. The technical hurdles to learning translation tools and CVS are quite high. While there is no problem with what we have now (other than suggested in the Larry's original summary) there are always non-technical people who want to contribute to open source projects, and translation is an ideal opportunity to allow this. I feel that having the option of using a web-based tool to allow this is good. If I18N is important to Drupal (and it obviously widens the potential market) then the volume of translation will have to increase exponentially, and hence the more accessible we can make the translation the better.
I have seen the number of translations increasing once we started to provide a PO import/export interface, despite the CVS storage. Sure there were translations imported by Gerhard and others for the translators. Going on a completely different route does not solve current problems in itself, in fact it might be harder fo people to adapt.
Goba
-- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 larry@garfieldtech.com ICQ: 6817012 "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson