[Bf-committers] UI Translation

[Rob Haarsma]

Ton Roosendaal wrote:

> After a quick review of tracker, and reactions we get by mail and  
> people on IRC... I'd like to get the following decision approved:
>
> Officially we'll limit UI translation to tooltips only. 

Why limit only to tooltips ?
Allow me to list the problems with the current translation implementation:

- Blender's UI truncates texts if they don't fit on a button.
This is very convenient, but gettext doesn't find the suitable 
translation anymore.

- The label and value of numeric buttons are drawn/translated in one pass.
This means that gettext would require a translation for each value a 
button can have.

- Popup menu buttons are coded in different ways.
The option list might contain texts with trailing whitespaces. Gettext 
requires
exact strings for a proper translation.

Please note that these artifacts mainly occur with the translation of 
buttons.
The toolbox and the pulldown menu's automatically adjust their size to 
the maximum
text length, so there is no problem here.


To keep it short...

I'd hate to see the current implementation getting disabled or removed 
from Blender.
The way it works now isn't flawless, but it works nicely and it doesn't 
harm anyone
or anything. Also, I don't like to disencourage the sweet folks that 
supplied the
available translations. And who knows, there might even be people on 
this planet
that actually use it !

Maybe we can decide to expand our limit, and officially support UI 
translation for
tooltips, toolbox and pulldown menu's ?


Rob.