[nycbug-talk] OT: gettext

[Charles Sprickman]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone here has experience using gettext to 
internationalize an application...  I've been trying to lend a hand on a 
project where the main developer's first language is not english and the 
source is full of lots of little grammar and spelling problems.

What I haven't found yet is something sort of outlining best practices 
when using gettext - our current plan is for me to just use the .pot file 
from the project to find all the source files and make corrections there. 
Thankfully poedit can open each file with an external editor, so this part 
is not too tough.  My changes (and we're talking upwards of a few hundred 
edits across a few dozen files) though are going to cause the other 
translators some grief.  As I understand it, this is what the process is:

*I open the template.pot file, which has a list of every translatable 
string as well as comments noting what files/line #'s the string is 
in.
*I edit each file, making my corrections, submit back to the project.
*At this point, I've changed the "keys" - the english strings in the 
source are what all the .po files for each other language reference - ick
*Some poor bastards now have to re-do every .po file to match my new 
message strings

Something smells wrong about that setup -  by changing the source I'm 
altering something that all the other translations rely on to key their 
translated strings.  That's making a ton of work for other people who may 
already have totally correct and clear translations.

Am I missing something?  Is the project lead pointing me in the wrong 
direction?

My idea was to make english.po file and leave the source untouched, but 
I've been told that's the "wrong way" to do this.

Any pointers appreciated...

Thanks,

Charles