[Gardeners] Taking a dive in the lisp pool...

[JC Helary]

Tim,

Thank you for the answer.

I have a few questions that are not directly related to axiom but  
rather to Lisp application localization in general.

> Well, sort-of. We have collected most of the strings into a file  
> called
> s2-us.msgs with the intention of rewriting them into non-english. But
> that's as far as I can carry the effort since I don't speak other
> languages.

Is this .msgs a standard format ? Or something that you created for  
the occasion ?
Is your string extraction procedure generalizable to other Lisp  
applications ?
Would the strings have to be limited to such and such encoding, or  
does your application support _any_ encoding or Unicode in general ?
Does axiom understand OS locale variables so as to display UI  
messages according to the locale ?

>> Since you mention po4a do I have to suppose that all your strings are
>> already in po files ?
>
> Nope. As I say, I just made the offer last week and I just got the
> po4a reply yesterday. I looked at the tool but have no idea how much
> work it would be. It doesn't seem to know about Latex and all  
> scientific
> work is in Latex.

The documentation looks like po4a does not know Latex. There would be  
other tools available with similar functions but I am not aware of  
anything that supports Latex natively. I'll keep looking though.

In the meanwhile, what really matters here is what has been done with  
the UI strings: extract them, put them in a regular format, translate  
them in the same format, re-inject them in the original document.

I don't have enough knowledge about Latex to assess the difficulty of  
such an endeavour, but translating within the format means one needs  
to know the format to some extend...

>> If such a system has been developed but the app is not localized to
>> French, do you think that could be a first step, before working on
>> the doc ?
>
> Sure. The simple first step is to translate the strings in s2-us.msgs,
> run the system, and see what results. Since most of the system  
> interaction
> is equations the number of messages is quite small.

See my questions above.

> The second aspect though is a larger task. There is a help subsystem
> called HyperDoc which is based on our own (pre-browser) technology
> from 1990 or so. It contains a lot of english text and would also
> require translation.

Same a the remarks for Latex: if there is a way to extract the  
strings and re-inject them or package them after translation then  
translation is possible.

>> Go ahead, the translation tool I use does not have Latex support but
>> I could hack a few things and see how it behaves with your files.
>
> Visit http://daly.axiom-developer.org
>
> The source files and the pdf are listed in the left hand column.
> You can download them from there.

I found them, thank you.

JC