[Sugar-devel] i18n improvement experiment

[Chris Leonard]

Dear Activity developers,

I'm not 100% sure if this will work, but I'd like to try it out with
one activity to test it.

Generally, the first line of any POT file is the Actviity name, which
is typically picked up from the activity.info file (specifically
activity/activity.info:2), although it sometimes also appears
elsewhere in the activity's code .

e.g.

#: activity/activity.info:2 exporthtml.py:96 PortfolioActivity.py:295
msgid "Portfolio"
msgstr "

#: activity/activity.info:2
msgid "Calculate"
msgstr ""

What I am wondering is if it is possible to insert a TRANS comment in
the activity.info file that would contain the link to the Activity's
homepage on the Sugar Labs wiki.

#. TRANS: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Portfolio

#. TRANS: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Calculate

What I am basically getting at is a way to associating the wiki
homepage information with the Actvity name string in the PO file in
order to give localizers additional textual context to review before
doing the localization.  In an ideal world, localizers would play
around with the actifvity itself before localizing to get context, but
until we get a better SOAS version available, we have to accept that
not all localizers will have an XO laptop at hand or be Linux gurus
pulling Sugar packages from their distros.

As an example of a truly informative activity.info file, see the
activity.info file of the TamTamSuite:

http://git.sugarlabs.org/tamtam/tamtam/blobs/master/activity/activity.info

Walter, you may want to do something like this if/when you roll
multiple TurtleArt-related components into one PO file the way Aleksey
did with TamTamSuite.

I don't see the "homepage" field described on the page below, but it
doesn't seem to break anything, but I wouldn't know how to parse it
int oa translators' comment.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Almanac/Activity_Bundles

If anyone can describe a better way of accomplishing the same goal, I
would love to hear about it, otherwise, I would like to collaborate
with an activty developer to experiment with attempting to insert a
developer's comment for translators into an acitvity.info file to see
if we can provide an enhanced reference link in the PO file for
localizers.  Testing to include making hte edits, regenerating the
POT, pulling to Poolte, refreshing langs in Pootle and testing rebuilt
activity to make sure this insertion doesn't have unintended
side-effects.

Any volunteers?  If we can make this work, I'd like to make this an
"i18n best practice" for activity.info files.

cjl