Pseudolocalisation with podebug (1)
The Translate Toolkit has had a program to help with pseudolocalisation since 2004: podebug. This is the first in a series of articles about podebug and what it can be used for.
Pseudolocalisation is a way to quickly generate or manipulate translation files to use for testing. This way the translatability or (internationalisability) of a program can be tested without having to translate it first or to review it on the level of the source files. It can also help translators in that translations can be annotated and can therefore be found more easily.
One of the things for which our team uses it frequently in the development of Virtaal, is to check if all strings are marked for translation.
podebug --rewrite=xxx virtaal.pot fr.po
With this command podebug creates a PO file based on the POT file and "translates" it so that it looks as folllows:
#: ../share/virtaal/virtaal.glade.h:8
msgid "General"
msgstr "xxxGeneralxxx"
In the program, it looks like this:
Now one can see that all the entries are "translated", except for "About". This can indicate that a string is perhaps not marked for translation. In other cases (as is the case here) it indicates that the string is translated elsewhere. This string is part of GTK+, and the translation will be retrieved by GTK+ from another file.
So this is a quick and easy way to check if all strings are marked for translation.
Comments
An even better idea is to add
An even better idea is to add a non-ASCII character to the beginning and end of the string, such as a multibyte Chinese character. This way you verify the i18n *and* non-ASCII support at the same time.
Re: An even better idea is to add
Thanks for the comment, Ross. The xxx rule of podebug is really a quick and easy way to test for translatability. For other purposes, there are other techniques. More on them in later articles. To put a Chinese character in, could affect the how the rendering system chooses a font, and might not make for a great test if the tester doesn't have a Chinese font. So while testing non-ASCII is important, that is not what the xxx rule of podebug is ideal for.