[Mma] Re: Polish translation of octave documentation

[Paul Kienzle]

boud wrote:

>dear help-octave,
>   This message is to avoid doubled-up work in translating octave
>documentation into Polish.
>
>   We're some students + 1 faculty person ;) doing a course in
>"Mathematical Methods in Astronomy" at the Nicolas Copernicus University
>in Torun, Poland.
>
>  The students use their common sense and interest in astronomy to set
>their own goals and track their progress and communicate with one another
>using wiki technology, and the hope is to encourage usage of free software
>(in the GPL sense) so that the knowledge and skills learnt can be easily
>transferred to other students, or for example, high school teachers, who
>definitely do not have the money to waste on closed software.
>
>We're using octave 2.1.31 as a start, since it's GPL and we've heard
>good things about octave  :).
>
>Many of the students have chosen to translate a section of the octave
>documentation into Polish as one of their goals for their course:
>
>http://adjani.astro.uni.torun.pl:9673/zwicky/OctaveTlumaczenie
>
>Two obvious questions are:
>
>(1) Are you aware of other people doing Polish translations of octave docs?
>(There's no point people doubling up, even if some proofreading could be
>useful.)
>
>(2) What would be the best way of submitting this for integration into
>the octave distribution?
>
>
>Please feel free to reply directly to our mailing list:
>http://adjani.astro.uni.torun.pl/mailman/listinfo/mma
>  
>
I do hope you got an appropriate response already
from John Eaton.  If not, you are always welcome
to post things to octave-forge (http://octave.sf.net)
so long as you are willing to maintain them.  I don't
know any Polish 8-)

It would be fairly easy to write a help function
which searches a different path for the polish
documentation on each individual function, or
call help() if it doesn't work.  Using the polish
word for "help" as the function name seems
appropriate.

More difficult is dealing with error messages.
We could probably modify error.cc so that
it looks up the messages in the locale specific
data base using gettext.  This should handle
most cases.  The remaining cases can be
handled by either sending them through
error or warning as they should be, or by
using _("text"). You will also need a version
of _() for use in scripts.

Paul Kienzle
pkienzle at users.sf.net