gettext.. whats the point!

[dreamwest]

What the point of gettext when you STILL have to manually edit language.po files, might as well named it preg_replace

 

[salathe]

Did you just come to rant or are you genuinely interested in the topic?

[dreamwest]

It would be interesting if it actually did translate, not just replace your own translated text

 

an example:

The translator will have to edit these, either by hand or with a translation tool like Poedit, or Emacs with its editing mode for .po files. When they are done, the entry will look like this:
#: src/name.c:36
msgid "My name is %s.\n"
msgstr "Je m'appelle %s.\n"

 

Basically its just replacing text

 

[Daniel0]

How the hell is it supposed to translate the text for you?

[dreamwest]

like most desktop apps do, magical gnomes sit there and translate the text for you 

 

..but back to your question (which im asking also) "How the hell is it supposed to translate the text for you?"

 

Answer:

It doesnt it just swaps text

 

Which brings me back my first question - whats the point?

 

Im gonna name it "swaptext"

[.josh]

I think because most sites that offer different language versions of their pages, don't try to translate arbitrary text on-the-fly from some generator, but instead hire professional translation services, so they are just swapping prefab text to begin with.  And IMO that's the better route at this time...translation engines aren't all that great at being accurate... I don't know very many businesses willing to put their trust in them for trying to sell stuff.

[gizmola]

I think because most sites that offer different language versions of their pages, don't try to translate arbitrary text on-the-fly from some generator, but instead hire professional translation services, so they are just swapping prefab text to begin with.  And IMO that's the better route at this time...translation engines aren't all that great at being accurate... I don't know very many businesses willing to put their trust in them for trying to sell stuff.

 

Yeah this is pretty much what I've seen as well.  It very much depends on the business, as many times there are a lot of things you need to change about the way your products or services are presented from one country or market to the next.  For those sites that basically just want a translation, they can use these standards based formats to pass files back and forth to translation services. 

 

I will throw in for the record that I've heard good things about Zend_Translate from ZF as an alternative to gettext.

[Daniel0]

Zend_Translate supports gettext as backend.