GNOME 2.30 Translations for the Faint of Heart
With the GNOME 2.30 release just around the corner, translators are feverishly working hard to get the desktop completely translated into a multitude of different languages! But unless you’re comfortable building the application you’re trying to translate on your own (or perhaps the entire desktop), you’re pretty much doing what I call “blind translations.”
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The good news is that you don’t have to do any compiling to play with the very latest GNOME applications! Just download the GNOME Developer Kit and start translating knowing that you can actually see what you’re translating!
Borrowing from a previous post I wrote, just what is the GNOME Developer Kit? It is a continuous build of GNOME packages all bundled up into a distribution (in this case, Foresight Linux) and distributed in a few different formats that you can either install or run in a virtual environmen.
So if you’re a translator or writing docs, imagine being able to see the application you’re trying to translate running right in front of you! As the GNOME Developer’s Kit already comes with a lot of tools such as gettext, intltool and poEdit, you got your work cut out for you!
So don’t just sit there! Go download your GNOME Developer Kit today!
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March 2nd, 2010 at 4:58 am
Hi Og,
This is really useful for translators, thanks for the post!
The last times I tried the GDK to test translations, though, only a few languages could be selected on GDM, and there was no language selector within the session. So as it was not included, I had to give up testing Catalan, but I’d very much like to give it another go this time.
Does the current GDK allow selecting all GNOME languages?
March 2nd, 2010 at 7:34 am
Another option: turn on the adrenaline and just build everything from git – jhbuild
hahaha
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:30 am
Hey David,
Yup. This version actually seems to have all the available languages from GNOME in the language selector. You have to select “Other” and then wait for the popup dialog to select your language.
This developer kit is refreshed on a daily basis so things could break after an update… but if you find yourself staring at a blank screen after an update, switch to level 3, turn on your internet device, and run sudo conary rollback 1 to revert all changes and go back to normal.
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:31 am
Yeah Jonh! Nothing like the rush of waiting for GNOME to build under jhbuild!
March 2nd, 2010 at 5:18 pm
Hi Og
I tried it some months ago, and it very quickly had problems when updating. It also took very, very long to do updates on my slow ADSL connection, was very unreliable, and therefore had to repeat the very slow proses many times to complete one update.
Have things improved in terms of updating speed and reliability of updates? At the time the foresight guys couldn’t help me to get back to a working system, and I can’t really download these things afresh all the time.
At the moment I’m using a VM with the development version of some distro. They update things fairly regularly as well – more frequently than I will be updating translations anyway, and we are currently in string freeze, so things are quite stable.
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:28 pm
Hey Friedel! The first time you run the update command, conary, the package management system, has to introspect your entire system in order to grab only the changes needed to bring it up to date… that first time is a bit “expensive” but conary has improved a lot these last few iterations, so you may want to give it another chance.
Now, do keep in mind that the GNOME Developer Kit, contrary to Foresight, gets new bits every time someone checks something into git.gnome.org… so you are definitely running bleeding edge and the chance that your system will suffer some set backs is very high. I guess it is the price you pay to have access to latest and greatest. 