[Scummvm-devel] Transifex

Max Horn max at quendi.de
Wed Nov 17 13:06:46 CET 2010


Am 17.11.2010 um 11:20 schrieb Thierry Crozat:

> On 16 November 2010 20:32, Thierry Crozat <criezy at scummvm.org> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> And for the "Submit translation" button I get a different error message:
>> "Only UTF-8 encoding files are supported". This one is clear, but since we
>> cannot use UTF-8 this is quite a problem.
>> 
>> I asked about encoding support on their support web site. We will see...
>> 
> 
> Here is the answer I received:
> 
> "We took the decision to remove support for non-unicode files in Transifex,
> in order to ensure everyone works on the same encoding and avoid confusion
> with translators. I'm sure your project has experience handling them, but
> they were actually causing all kind of problems with most people, and added
> lots of code on our part, which often didn't work perfectly. =)
> 
> What you can do is create a separate directory with UTF files and before
> your app uses them, convert them to the old ones. It should be a simple
> command-line script, if you're willing to use it.
> 
> Hope this helps!"


Ouch! While I understand their reasoning to a degree, this kind of kills transifex for us, doesn't it?

Of course we could convert from/to UTF-8 using a script and e.g. the "recode" tool. But then translators would have to work on the UTF-8 versions of the files, and others (devs) would have to constantly ensure that these and the real .po files always stay in sync. But the idea behind using transifex was to *reduce* the amount of work needed to work on translations, so this limitation seems to mostly negates that advantage. A pity.
If they just would allow a "power mode", where project maintainers cold specify alternate encodings for select files, and they then use recode transparently in the background to convert the file to UTF-8 and back... But I guess even that can be problematic if no faithful conversion is possible. Argh.

I wonder if this "Pootle" tool you mentioned in an earlier mail does better in this regard?

Cheers,
Max



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