launchpad?

CSL Development
1

I wonder if it would be valuable to create an xbib (or csl? something
else?) project at Launchpad, and use their system for coordinating
issues (including translations*) across projects?

Just thought I’d ask while it popped into my head; am not exactly sure
of the details of how it would work …

Bruce

  • not knowing much about the translation issue, but having heard from
    Helga on the Zotero forums that she had real problems working with
    Babelzilla and was frustrated by the experience, and noting that
    Launchpad includes translation functionality.
2

There might be other reasons to use Launchpad, but I don’t think there’s
actually too much of a translation issue at the moment. The technical
threshold might just be a bit high for the average end user (who would
have to register for BabelZilla, download the file, open it in a text
editor that supports UTF-8, and upload it), but most of the folks on
BabelZilla seem to be doing fine, and we do have 30 or so versions of
that file in varying degrees of completion.

If accessibility is a concern, the real issue is that the strings are in
a custom, hierarchical XML format, so there’s no way for any preexisting
localization system to automate the process–hence the
download/edit/upload hassle on BZ. I’m sure the Launchpad UI is far
superior to BabelZilla’s, but it would still require using GNU
gettext-compatible files. If we were going to convert the XML to flat
strings with unique keys, we could just as easily put them in one of the
Mozilla-compatible formats that BabelZilla handles natively, and then
users could edit them through BZ’s web interface the way they do all the
other Zotero files. BabelZilla leaves much to be desired, but it has a
great community, and the translators there have done pretty remarkable
work expanding the number of locales supported by Zotero.

I’ve written a script to make the process of getting the locales.xml
files back and forth between the XBib repo, the Zotero codebase, and BZ
as seamless as possible. It wouldn’t be too difficult to edit it to sync
the XML files with a format that BZ can handle natively–it’s just not a
top priority, and ideally the need for it will be decreasing as the
locales get refined and the CSL spec settles down.

  • Dan
3

…

I’ve written a script to make the process of getting the locales.xml
files back and forth between the XBib repo, the Zotero codebase, and BZ
as seamless as possible. I

So the question the translation issue is, how to address Helga’s
frustration? She’s done the translations, but sees no way for them to
ultimately get incorporated into Zotero.

Bruce