[MTOS-translators] Russian translation

[Alex Demidov]

> There is a Russian translation!? Wow, this is awesome.

There is project for Russian translation started last August by Andrey
Serebryakov
who is actively popularizing Movable Type for Russian community at his site
http://movable-type.ru/
and he have done most of text translation.

This project based on MTOS 4.1 sources and includes not only text
translation but
also some changes to templates and code - for example,  we have updated
dirify tables
to include russian chars, added support for <noindex> tag used by most
popular Russian
search engine Yandex (analog to rel="nofollow"), added support for Russian
date format,
changed Calendar Widget to use Monday as week starting day (BTW, is there
any other way
to change this instead of modifying templates?) and many other changes.

This project currently hosted on Google Code (
http://code.google.com/p/movabletype/) and
there is first public build available which was released only few weeks ago.

> Would you guys like me to set up a SVN repos for you to check in changes?
We
> can then work on automating builds and so forth to make it easier to
package
> and deploy.

We already have modified MTOS build scripts to support automated build of
Russian version.
There is patch against http://code.sixapart.com/svn/movabletype/tags/mt4.1

http://alexd.vinf.ru/files/patch-rubuild.gz

It should apply clearly to branches/release-38 too and with minor
modification to trunk/

> I can give all of you access if you want...

We will be glad to have access to MTOS SVN. It would be much more simple to
maintain
Russian language support in future MTOS releases if some of our changes will
be included
in official repository. But some of our changes currently is just hacks and
is incompatible with
other languages and locales.

There is minimal set of files which will add basic Russian language support
to MTOS without
breaking other locales:

http://alexd.vinf.ru/files/patch-rubuild.gz
http://alexd.vinf.ru/files/ru-filter.pl
http://alexd.vinf.ru/files/patch-rudate41.gz
http://alexd.vinf.ru/files/patch-dirify.gz
http://code.google.com/p/movabletype/source/browse/trunk/lib/MT/L10N/ru.pm
http://code.google.com/p/movabletype/source/browse/trunk/php/lib/l10n_ru.php
http://code.google.com/p/movabletype/source/browse/trunk/index.html
http://code.google.com/p/movabletype/source/browse/trunk/readme.html

After applying these changes it will be possible to build Russian MTOS with
standard
build/exportmt.pl script.

> As for pluralization - can you share how this works within the context of
> text that is translated? Do we need to markup the text in any special way
to
> make this work?

Russian plurals support works by overriding standard Locale::Maketext
function 'quant' and
doesn't require any changes in original text. There is example:

'[quant,_1,hour,hours] ago' => '[quant,_1,час,часа,часов] назад'

But there is one issue with using plurals in templates - translation applies
only when template
is generated so using [quant] is useless - we will always have translated
string with number 0.
For example, default_templates/comments.mtml has following code:

<h2 class="comments-header"><__trans phrase="[_1] Comments"
params="<$MTEntryCommentCount$>"></h2>

This will translate to following code in generated template:

<h2 class="comments-header"><$MTEntryCommentCount$> комментариев</h2>

And this translation is wrong for comments count 1,2,3,4,21,22,23,24 ...
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.sixapart.com/pipermail/mtos-translators/attachments/20080507/1f5accaf/attachment.html