Hi,
my name is Ivo Hinkelmann, I am responsible for the localisation of the
OpenOffice / StarOffice product. My domain is the technical part of the
integration of the translation into the source and the tooling around
the l10n process. As Arthur wrote that not all questions have been
answered, I will try to do so:
Arthur Buijs wrote:
Hi all,
this morning I installed the Dutch RC2 for OOo 2.0.1 on my laptop and
realized that the state of the current translation is worse than it
has been in a long time. I am mainly talking about the gui here. I
don't use the help files very much and I know we are not ready
reviewing those so they are not ready anyway.
There are also some posts about this (in English) on our
[email protected] list. I have also discussed the current
situation with Bert (Broxtor) on irc. We both don't know what is
happening. I also see a post from Simon Brouwer on Releases.
I want to talk about three things with Sun:
1) What is happening
2) What can we do regarding 2.0.1
3) How do we proceed after 2.0.1 is out
ad 1) What is happening
-----------------------
We are very concerned about the time spend by our volunteers who have
been reviewing the gui and the accelerator keys and who are right now
reviewing the helpfiles. They ask me if their work is taken seriously.
I don't want to loose these community volunteers! They are entitled to
get a good explanation from me or Bert. But before that can happen we
need an explanation from Sun.
Ok, lets start here. First of all we take your work _very_ seriously!
During the localisation of the OOo 2.0.1 I was confronted with a lot of
problems. We always try to minimize the errors, but OOo is a huge and
complex software product, we are not able to prevent them 100 %. The
root cause of all problems is the fact that the localisations are done
and inegrated at the last possible time, straight before the release
ships. We can not change this tight timeframe, as more and more features
come into the product and all want to be localised. The result is, that
if any errors occur, the is nearly no time left to get everything in the
correct status. Thus it is not unusual to see problems the first time in
the release candidates.
I want to pick up two problems that occur during this localisation
round. As you want to know what exactly happend I provide you with some
technical background.
- Missing topic's in Dutch online help
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=56089
This nasty bug was caused by two wrong string:
"xxxx xxxx <item type="productname">%PRODUCTNAME</item> xxxx"
instead of
"xxxx xxxx %PRODUCTNAME xxx"
and
the string "=, <, >, <=, >=, <> - Operatoren [Runtime]" was merged
unquoted into the help tree files.
The xml tag in those strings caused the help viewer to throw out all
topics below them. The xml document is invalid. It took me a lot of time
to find out that there are two of the 100.000 ( ? ) strings caused that.
The strings are syntactical correct, our basic validation checks do not
find it.
- Old GUI in the rc-2
A childworkspace introduce a comment into one of our resource files (
GenericCommands.xcu ), see issue
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=57889+
The tool that merges the localisation into that xcu file is a "lex"
based parser. The comment caused all string below that comment to change
their identifier. The result of the changed identifier is that the
strings apears to be unlocalized within the Office GUI. The OOo 2.0.1
rc-1 GUI was completly broken for all community based languages. During
the repair of that I insert those buggy Opmaak -> Formaat and the dupe
Bestand > Nieuw entires as a mistake.
Those two are typicaly problems that _always_ occur when there is nearly
no time left.
ad 2) What can we do regarding 2.0.1
------------------------------------
If there is going to be a RC3 for OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 we can put
together a list of gui strings that have to be changed to get the gui
in an acceptable state. Please give me a deadline and tell me how to
provide this list to you. This is probably also very important for
your plans to release StarOffice 8 in Dutch before the end of the year.
Thanks to Bert we fix those showstoppers in the cws dutchfix.
http://eis.services.openoffice.org/EIS2/servlet/cws.ShowCWS?Id=3334&Path=SRC680%2Fdutchfix
There are a few wrong accelerator keys left, but I concentrate on fixing
the showstoppers in time. If you find further issues please report
immediately, but I can not garantie that they can be fixed in time.
My problem is that I do not speak Dutch nor 30+ other languages that we
process here. I need your help to identify and solve such issues. Please
do not take it personal if you don't see your provided updated strings
in the product. The last 3 weeks I worked several times 12+ hours and/or
work on weekend to get the localisation into the correct status. Please
report, write issue, contact me by mail ( [EMAIL PROTECTED] ) or on IRC
( server: irc.freenode.net channel: #openofficeorg user: ivo ). I will
do my best to solve any problems asap.
ad 3) How do we proceed after 2.0.1 is out
------------------------------------------
Our community really wants to cooperate with Sun on translation. To
understand our role and responsibilities better, we need better
explanation from Sun about how the process regarding the translation
of OOo work. Who does what / when etc. Maybe we talk about this on
IRC. For now our priority is to get an acceptable 2.0.1 to be
available in Dutch too.
May be Rafaella can complete the big picture. I can only give you an
overview from my perspective. An abstract:
-A lot of new features get introdcued in the Office code. This happens
till the UI Freeze denies l10n releated features in the source code. (
One flaw happend in OOo 2.0.1 is that this role have been ignored as
important feature aren't ready in time. )
-An automatic process extract all new strings from the source code and
import them into a translation database
-We hand over all new string to Rafaella
...
-We receive them back ( Ian McDonald ) and merge them into the source
code ( myself )
-The childworkspace get integrated into the master. ( Usually this is
"the last cws integration date" )
-I provide test build ( key id and l10n ) to QA the result
-Fix everything that goes wrong
We already started to have localisation cycles, the big amount of
strings are divided into smaller chunks. Providing 3 or 4 test builds
between the release gives us the chance to find issues faster.
One consequences of the problems in OOo 2.0.1: We want to provide a
bigger gap beween the last l10n integration and the final product
allowing us to find all problems in time. And important, no more
features integration after the "UI Freeze" date.
Groeten,
Ivo
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