Sun, 04 Jan 2004

Buried below po files

Exams are near, so it's probably translation season again, that time of the year when I work hard on all those Catalan translations I have neglected during the last months.

This evening I've restarted my work on GNOME 2.6, due on March. The number of new strings or strings to update is long, but I normally make it. What worries me is that the proposed modules for inclusion in GNOME 2.6 will add 6000+ strings to the list, and I'm not sure we'll be able to cope with that. There's an ongoing thread on gnome-i18n discussing this.

While doing updates and assigning modules to other translators, I've noticed that our gal translation was quite outdated, but I remember Aleix had updated it recently. For some months, Evo folks have asked to translate evolution 1.4, and recently they switched their focus to 1.5. All the translation work on evolution-1-4-branch hasn't been ported to HEAD, so the gal translation was temporarily lost. Of course, I watch for these things for my team, but I wonder how many translations get lost during branch transitions at GNOME's CVS. Another example, with the libmrproper -> planner transition, we have lost our last update to libmrproper's ca.po. I need to merge them back manually using msgcat or whatever.

Besides GNOME, I had also promised Debian Installer translations for December 28, but never got near finishing it. It won't take long though, that's #1 priority right now. On the Debian Catalan l10n front, Guillem and I are planning a rebirth of the Catalan team, as the current model didn't scale too well: I was the only person reviewing what needed committing, and some of the translations that came in needed hours of correction work, so I ended burning out. Now there are other Catalan-speaking Debian developers, and hopefully we'll be able to work more efficiently in the future.