Plugin Translations

Most texts from TWiki core code default pattern skin templates have been translated by now. Still plugin interfaces are mostly in English. We need a mechanism to translate plugin texts, and load these without too much overhead (reading of the current locale text files already takes much processing time in topic rendering).

A suggestion: a locale directory for each plugin or template.

-- Contributors: ArthurClemens

Discussion

There are logistic issues with this on doing the actual translations. I think the chance of translaters translating the plugin texts is better if they go into one big file when doing the translation. That is:

• One file for translators (or perhaps two, one that includes default distribution, and one that includes +twikiplugins)
• Many files for distribution (actual number should be weighted against optimal performance)

This will take some scripting to chop translations into parts / put them together again - I'm not sure how realistic this is at all. Will need some further examination.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 27 Jun 2006

I think that one file for all plugins, keeping the default plugins together with the core, would be a good shot.

Then the current extraction script could be extended to extract string from plugins also.

-- AntonioTerceiro - 27 Jun 2006

Plugins could even share strings ....

-- AntonioTerceiro - 27 Jun 2006

Yes, but

• Software (gtranslator for example) allows to reuse translations in a easy way;
• The same string may require different translation in different context;
• Users may have different combinations of plugin versions with different string set;
• Plugin update shold imply the proper plugin string translation update.

Keeping plugin string translation in the same file will lead to inconsistence plugin string translations so far.

We already suffer from this with skin translations. It seems to be completely impossible to support all them in one file as the translator can not know context in the most of skins.

-- SergejZnamenskij - 08 Feb 2007

Yes, please enhance TWiki to a fully featured TMS.

-- FranzJosefSilli - 08 Feb 2007