gettextized pyDDR

[Roberto Piscitello]

Hi,
  I'm new to this ML.
I contacted theGREENzebra some month ago (I sent him a little
synchronization patch for dwi2step.py), promising him to help somehow in
the future developement of pyDDR.

Since I've been silent for too long and since I'm not a skinned python
programmer, I've started some work on i18n and l10n.

I gettextized pyDDR 0.7.1 and made a first translation of it (in
Italian).
Since I didn't ask if somebody else were already working on this, I hope
it isn't an unuseful/duplicated work:-)

I used pygettext to generate the .pot file and the standard GNU msgmerge
& msgfmt to update and compile the .po file.
I slightly changed some English string in order to make it easier to
translate.
The only file that has remarkable changes is optionscreen.py (see
below).

Everything has been quite simple, but some issues still remain:

1. I couldn't understand how to translate some deeply hardcoded labels,
such as difficulty levels (BASIC, TRICK, MANIAC, ...), game types
(SINGLE, DOUBLE, ...), etc.

2. Some text messages are hardcoded in pixmaps. It is the case of the
"Ready? Go!" message and of every help message (describing the keys'
function).
They should be substituted with runtime printed strings (giving them
some additional room, since translated strings are often longer than the
English ones).

3. The new option screens are too full of strings to be translated in a
sane way, since (as I stated before) the Italian translation would
require more space.
Some languages are inherently more verbose than English; moreover
sometimes an English word simply doesn't exist as a single word in the
other language, but requires two or three.
I know that option screens are under heavy development, but I propose an
alternative, cleaner version.
Menus are reorganized and many options have a changed name.
Please, simply consider it as a suggestion.

I'm waiting for comments and suggestions.

Ciao,
    robepisc



PS: in order to test the Italian translation, compile it with:
# msgfmt -o CORRECT_PREFIX/pyddr.mo pyddr.po
where CORRECT_PREFIX probably is /usr/share/locale/it/LC_MESSAGES
(unless you modify the gettext initialization lines in pyddr.py and
any2dance.py). Then launch:
# LANG=it ./pyddr

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