[Inx] What about a French translation?

[Peter Garrett]

On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:20:47 +0200
Vincent <the.addikt1ve at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi :)
> 
> We are three, we are from France, and we'd like to translate INX!

Well, that would be great, but as Karl says, it might be a lot of work!

> In order to begin that work, I'd like to talk with a developer. 

I guess that mostly means me ;-)

> Since I
> didn't take a look at INX's code, I absolutly don't know if there are
> language keys we may edit or if we need to hack the code deeper.

To be honest, translation was not something that I thought about from
the beginning, when I started INX. I don't think I really expected it to
be distributed, even. That has happened though, so the fact that it is
only in English is limiting. If I had foreseen that it would be used in
many countries, I would have written it differently, I think. On the
other hand, my knowledge of coding is limited to Bash, and I have no
experience with internationalising a project...

By chance, I have a bit of French. I spent six years in Switzerland as
a small child, at Genève, but that was long ago. My French is pretty
rusty now, but I could comment on a translation. The main difficulty
would be that a lot of the "output" text is divided into very small
parts, often a single line for example, and we are looking at up to 15
000 lines of bash code, although that includes blank lines, and only
part of that is actual text 'output'. There is a lot of text output
though, of course - for example the tutorials alone come to around 3
500 lines, and possibly half of those lines or more are actual English
text. I haven't tried to write a script to work out how many ;)

The code is on launchpad of course:

https://code.launchpad.net/~inx-devel/inx/scriptsandfunctions

and since it is all in Bash, or in some cases text files, you can read
it while running the actual system as well - mostly
in /usr/local/lib/inx/ and /usr/local/sbin/ , with man pages
in /usr/local/share/man/ and a few snippets in /home/inx that come
from /etc/skel (those are not included on Launchpad but are contained
in the "buildinx-extras.tar" which has /etc/skel/ and video,
pictures etc. at

http://inx.maincontent.net/buildinx/

The division between the build extras and the code on LP is
unfortunate, but this happened before I discovered version control, and
has not yet been changed... Also, files like fractal pictures and the
video have no place on Launchpad, as far as I can see.

If you want to start translating, perhaps the first text to try would
be the files in share/doc/inx/ . The important thing here is that the
number of lines and layout in files is always important because they
have to fit, and preferably look good, without too many odd
indentations or irregularities :) The 'advanced' and 'starter' files
are used by the 'reader' script. I had plans to use 'reader' more, but
Real Life keeps getting in the way of coding ;-)

I grew quite a few extra grey hairs putting INX together *grin*

Peter
-- 
"INX Is Not X" Live CD based on Ubuntu 8.04 : http://inx.maincontent.net
Screenshots slideshow: http://inx.maincontent.net/album/1.png.html
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