Re: [l10n-dev] Scottish Gaelic (gd) localisation

[Michael Bauer]

Is there a specific reason you mention them in this order? I usually try
to sort alphabetically or in order of frequency if it is obvious (for
example I usually list the capitals last).  Where shall we position the
Tironian ampersand (when we decide which one to use :-)?
Errr, no, sorry, they just group that way phonologically in Gaelic, 
alphabetically is fine.

As a total outsider it seems as if 204A could hold some advantages, but
in terms of the practicalities I can't cast a judgement. The ideal would
be if we gradually do things better, but it is hard to convince people
to improve font support for small languages. It is a common problem in
Africa for languages needing extra diacritics. Now if you could get some
government to mandate language support for imported products, it might
just get fixed quite quickly :-)
Ya that would be the thing. I did a test page and a straw poll on my 
Facebook account. Last time I ran a test, virtually everyone had boxes 
but this time, only about half reported probles and then usually linked 
to Google Chrome; interestingly cross-OS support has improved. What 
worries me is that mobile devices can't handle 204A at all by the looks 
of it, whereas most seem to do the other one fine. So I think we'll go 
with the second-best option for now; I'll monitor development and when I 
can see a majority of platforms supporting 204A, we can make the change. 
For now, it's more important that it displays, rather than encoding purity.



Similar things to what would help improving OpenOffice.org. We can use
a spell checker and autocorrect data exactly as they are used in
OpenOffice.org.  I guess Kevin Scannel is the best person to talk to
with regards to spell checkers.  I can help you build the necessary
autocorrect files - we have some scripts to take a spreadsheet of
incorrect ->  correct columns and generate the file needed for Virtaal
and OpenOffice.org.
There already is one: 
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/project/faclair-afb (though 
the server seems to be down just now). Is there some way we can utilise 
that?

Another interesting feature of Virtaal is Autoterm, where translators
can automatically obtain the common FOSS glossary. Read more here:
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/virtaal/autoterm

Sounds good, I'll check it out.

Thanks for all your help!

Michael
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Re: [l10n-dev] Scottish Gaelic (gd) localisation

[F Wolff]

Op Do, 2011-01-13 om 12:35 + skryf Michael Bauer:
> The preferred name is Scottish Gaelic (Gaelic is ambiguous as you say, 
> referring to Scots, Irish and Manx Gaelic).

I committed initial support for Scottish Gaelic including the plural
form to our software, and it will form part of our next release.


> Special characters would be the vowels with grave Àà Òò Ùù Èè Ìì ...

Is there a specific reason you mention them in this order? I usually try
to sort alphabetically or in order of frequency if it is obvious (for
example I usually list the capitals last).  Where shall we position the
Tironian ampersand (when we decide which one to use :-)?


>   ... and the 
> Tironian ampersand. Now technically that's ⁊ at U+204A but practically 
> speaking, people often use ┐ at U+2510 because it's visually usually the 
> same but is more commonly represented in fonts. 204A would be better but 
> I can live with 2510. What do you think?

I can't speak for the font coverage. On my system U+204A is displayed
with DejaVu Sans just fine, which is the font used as the main UI font
on most Linux distributions, I think. It is also packaged with
OpenOffice.org as far as I know, so it isn't totally unsupported. In
tools that use a Monospace font by default (like Virtaal or text
editors) it might be more of an issue, since I see it isn't present in
DejaVu Sans Mono, although I still have it in the FreeMono font on my
system. Most such editors allow setting a custom font anyway.

The more important issue might be that the Unicode properties for these
two characters are different. The one is classified as punctuation
(204A) and the other as a symbol (2510). This won't make a difference in
many situations, but can only make things go wrong. I guess it might
affect advanced searches, line breaking and maybe more. I can't say for
sure.

As a total outsider it seems as if 204A could hold some advantages, but
in terms of the practicalities I can't cast a judgement. The ideal would
be if we gradually do things better, but it is hard to convince people
to improve font support for small languages. It is a common problem in
Africa for languages needing extra diacritics. Now if you could get some
government to mandate language support for imported products, it might
just get fixed quite quickly :-)


> What sort of customisations for Virtaal are you talking about? I've not 
> used it much so not sure what's possible etc.

Similar things to what would help improving OpenOffice.org.  We can use
a spell checker and autocorrect data exactly as they are used in
OpenOffice.org.  I guess Kevin Scannel is the best person to talk to
with regards to spell checkers.  I can help you build the necessary
autocorrect files - we have some scripts to take a spreadsheet of
incorrect -> correct columns and generate the file needed for Virtaal
and OpenOffice.org.

Another interesting feature of Virtaal is Autoterm, where translators
can automatically obtain the common FOSS glossary. Read more here:
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/virtaal/autoterm

Further customisations to the quality checks might benefit users if
there are common false positives or cases where the accuracy of the
tests can be improved with knowledge of Scottish Gaelic. This is not
important or urgent. I guess if you use the quality checks you might
eventually know if there are things you want to see improved.

Keep well
Friedel


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Re: [l10n-dev] Scottish Gaelic (gd) localisation

[Michael Bauer]

The preferred name is Scottish Gaelic (Gaelic is ambiguous as you say, 
referring to Scots, Irish and Manx Gaelic).


Special characters would be the vowels with grave Àà Òò Ùù Èè Ìì and the 
Tironian ampersand. Now technically that's ⁊ at U+204A but practically 
speaking, people often use ┐ at U+2510 because it's visually usually the 
same but is more commonly represented in fonts. 204A would be better but 
I can live with 2510. What do you think?


What sort of customisations for Virtaal are you talking about? I've not 
used it much so not sure what's possible etc.


Cheers,

Michael

--
*Akerbeltz*
Goireasan Gàidhlig air an lìon
Fòn: +44-141-946 4437
Facs: +44-141-945 2701
*Am Faclair Beag  ◦ Akerbeltz 
 ◦ Firefox sa Ghàidhlig 
 ◦ Thunderbird sa Ghàidhlig 
 ◦ Opera 11 sa 
Ghàidhlig *

Re: [l10n-dev] Scottish Gaelic (gd) localisation

[F Wolff]

Op Di, 2011-01-11 om 13:50 + skryf Michael Bauer:
> Friedel,
> 
> Easy. The rules on Launchpad are wrong. I hadn't seen those as I tend 
> not to use Launchpad but prefer to handle gd localisations at each 
> project's source and localising and OS is not high on the list of 
> priorities right now. But thanks for pointing those out, I'll see if
> I 
> can get those amended.
> 
> Irish has a similar problem. Kevin Scannell once explained that in
> the 
> early days of the web some enthusiastic person put out a bad plural 
> ruleset for Irish and he's been chasing it around cyberspace ever
> since. 
> I'm also trying to get the right rules onto Unicode but those guys
> make 
> the Siachen Glacier look like a MiG.
> 
> Thanks for the headsup again!
> 
> Michael


Ok, I suspected something like that was possible. I'm adding support to
both Pootle, Virtaal and the Translate Toolkit. What is the preferred
name for your language? I see the ISO codes package refers to it as
"Gaelic; Scottish Gaelic" - we try to find a way of fixing these names,
at least for English. Should I prefer "Gaelic" or "Scottish Gaelic"? I
guess "Scottish Gaelic" is better since some people refer to Irish as
Gaelic as well.

Any special characters that localisers might not be able to type easily?
We can add those in Pootle as clickable links by default if you think it
is useful enough.

Furthermore, we can now look into our quality checks to see if any
customisations can be done to ensure they serve your language well. If
you are interested in customising Virtaal for some of its language
specific features, we can look down that path as well (not necessarily a
big task).

Keep well
Friedel


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Recently on my blog:
http://translate.org.za/blogs/friedel/en/content/versions-dependencies-different-distributions


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