Why does it even ask me?

Updated: because I had set signed.applets.codebase_principal_support in about:config to true to be able to pay my taxes online. I have set it back to false, and now the box doesn’t appear anymore.

What makes it special is that I have finally overtaken Spanish, so Galician is the highest-ranking language from Spain in that list :)

Also, I am now less than 200 strings away from Russian. That had not happened for a very long time… ;)

I’m so going to Debconf 8…

Here are my travel details to and from Buenos Aires, in case someone wants to fly with me:

• Dublin - Madrid, 7th August, 18:25-21:50, IB3183
• Madrid - Buenos Aires, 8th August, 01:25-08:40, IB 6843
• Buenos Aires - Madrid, 21st August, 21:45-14:30, IB 6844
• Madrid - Dublin, 22nd August, 16:10-17:35, IB 3184

All for 783 euros, bought 1 week ago. I’m arriving 1 day early and 4 days late, but I’ll take the chance to help the organization after my arrival and visit Buenos Aires after Debconf :)

And I’d also like to apologize in advance to anyone I ask to fetch me something, because, being Spanish, it is possible I’ll say something obscene instead ;)

Yes, I’m taking this as a competition :)

En España un 23,5% de visitas se dan en Firefox, un índice que es superior al de EE UU, pero que no llega a los índices de Polonia donde el 40% del tráfico se da en el navegador de Mozilla. A pesar de estos aceptables datos [Tristan] Nitot ha recordado y prácticamente hecho un llamamiento para crear una versión del navegador en gallego: “Hay una versión en catalán de Firefox construidas por voluntarios que les importa su idioma, al igual que la hay de euskera. Pero aún no hay una versión en Galicia, muchas veces me lo preguntan y mi respuesta es que si nadie de Galicia se presenta no habrá una versión en gallego, estamos dispuestos a que la gente trabaje con nosotros".

Loosely translated:

“There’s a Catalan version of Firefox built by volunteers who care about their language, and there’s another one in Basque. But there’s no Galician version yet, I get asked this very often, and my answer is that if nobody from Galicia steps up there will be no Galician version. We would like people to work with us".

So, apparently, there’s no Galician translation of Mozilla. I guess that my more than three years’ worth of work were wasted (Dec 2001 - Jul 2004 and Jan 2006 - Aug 2006), that Xis and Galego21 did nothing back in the nineties and noughties, and that what mancomun.org is hosting is an empty XPI file.

To not speak of the paralysed/paralysing bureaucracy of the Mozilla Foundation when several groups of volunteers, one after the other, tried to reinstate the official Galician l10n team.

I would be pissed off if I cared about Galician. Because, you know, from reading my blog it’s obvious I don’t.

I’m going to document my workflow, for two reasons: one is that others may find it useful or may suggest improvements. The other is that, in this way, I won’t depend on my bash history not being erased :)

I have a compendium with almost all strings in all debconf templates I translated, and several scripts I use to maintain that compendium, apply it to translations, etc. It is available at http://darcs.tarrio.org/gl-templates/, and can be downloaded with Darcs using this command:

$ darcs get http://darcs.tarrio.org/gl-templates/

In my local machine I keep it in $HOME/pos.

(You may use this compendium and scripts freely, if you want, but be sure to change all appearances of “gl.po” into the appropriate file name for your language.)

Nowadays I’m mostly driven by bubulle’s NMU announcements. Whenever he announces a NMU for a package I haven’t translated or whose Galician translation is outdated, I work on it.

This is what I do to start a new translation for a package called “example":

1. Extract the attached templates.pot file into $HOME/pos/example_templates.pot.
2. Bootstrap the translation with my compendium, using this command:

   $ ./bootstrap-po example_templates.pot > gl.po

   The script is smart enough to know that a file called example_templates.pot is a templates file for a package called example. However, I can specify a different package name as its second argument:

   $ ./bootstrap-po nonsensicalfilename.pot example > gl.po

3. The generated gl.po file is UTF-8 encoded. However, I use xemacs to translate, which cannot read that, so I encode it into iso-8859-1:

   $ msgconv -t iso-8859-1 gl.po -o gll.po

4. Edit the file.
5. Encode the edited file into utf-8:

   $ msgconv -t utf-8 gll.po -o gl.po

6. Add the translations to my compendium:

   $ ./add-total-po

   (My compendium is the total.po.txt file, hence the name.)

7. Optional: edit the compendium to remove obsolete strings or strings which may be ambiguous so I don’t want them in the compendium.
8. Send the translated file to the package maintainer using the BTS:

   $ ./send-po example

9. Record and push the changes to the compendium:

   $ darcs record -a
   $ darcs push -a

This is how I update an existing, outdated translation:

1. Extract the file into $HOME/pos/gl.po.
2. Most likely, it’s UTF-8 encoded. Encode it into iso-8859-1:

   $ msgconv -t iso-8859-1 gl.po -o gll.po

3. Edit the file, fix only the fuzzy translations.
4. Encode it back into UTF-8:

   $ msgconv -t utf-8 gll.po -o gl.po

5. Update the translation using the existing translated strings and the compendium:

   $ ./refresh-po gl.po | msgconv -t iso-8859-1 -o gll.po

6. Open the file. Hopefully you’ll have new fuzzy translations. Edit the translation and complete it, or do some strings then refresh again and edit and refresh again until the file is completed. If the file contains lots of similar sentences you can just translate a couple of them, refresh, and the other ones will then be all fuzzy. Magic!
7. When I’m done, encode into UTF-8, update the compendium, send to maintainer, submit changes to compendium.

I cannot remember what I wrote here when I signed up more than two years ago.

And, of course, there’s something good about this form, and something (else) bad about it:

The bad: this is displayed just after it has verified my email address.

The good: at least it’s not asking for my mother’s maiden name.

This said, have a look at this small piece of the KDE l10n stats page:

The funny thing is that the flag you see next to “Galician” is the flag of Greenland. And Galician is not spoken at all in Greenland! So, what happened? Why did they use so wrong a flag?

The problem is that the ISO 639-1 code for the Galician language is “gl”, which is the same as the ISO 3166-1 code for Greenland. So, when choosing the flag for Galician they confused the language code with the country code and selected the flag for “gl”: that is, for Greenland.

(I’m surprised that they used the Ukrainian flag (“ua”) for the Ukrainian language (“uk”), and not the Union Flag. Perhaps that would have been too obvious an error :) – although I have been told by email that the ISO 3166-1 code for the UK is “GB”, not “UK”)

So, my takeaway message is: don’t use flags to represent languages and if you do, make sure you use a flag of a place where the language is actually spoken!

Addendum: I have just seen that Basque is accompanied by the flag of the European Union! That’s because the language’s code is “eu”. Ah, and there are three variants of the Chinese language (Hong-Kong, Simplified and Traditional), all with the flag of the People’s Republic of China. Someone is bound to receive angry email – Taiwan is a political hot potato. I have sent email to the maintainer of the page.

WTF. That’s not even proper English. How am I supposed to translate it?

No, really. My mind boggles. I’m going out for a walk in the beautiful Dublin weather.