[Koha-devel] translation complaint...

[Benedict]

HI,
I want to stress that I am not a programmer but I happened to had
participated in a couple of translation projects all of which
originating from the linux world. 
None of them would rely on files tossed around the project but rather
they would have separate files, sigled out and being specifically of the
type of "language" files.
Take for example the "LearningAccess" clone of Koha (I did not
participate in that projects). They deviced a mechanism in PHP that
allowed the translators just to translate the "language" files into
their own languages.

To me, a no programmer, it seems a disastrous move, to start an
international effort to translate Koha in the way we do it today. Thank
God "acli" modified my polish files for the changes he thought relevant.
But Paul, who contributed a fantastic solution of text only include
files did it only for the French version. Now, I don't complain he was
egoistic. He had no choice, rather, because there was only a minor
change he proposed. In my opinion, however, Paul's change was crucial
for the future of Koha. He showed that the interface may be simple and
very functional.... .

After what I said, a no programmer at all, please flame me or guide
me... . My suggestion is to implement a gettext-like solution where
there's a set of files of interest to translators and these and only
these files (or images) are to be modified for the i18n to take effect.

Imagine a template file changes in the ./default/en/ directory and the
author ignores informing about it the rest of the community. Now,
everybody (of the international community) is to figure out what changes
took place and when they took place, and he is to manually find the
lines to be translated and modified.
It seems insane to me.

Benedict,
(only here I repeat: I am a no programer and I may be missing an
important point here)