[XBoard-devel] Internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) of XBoard/WinBoard

[Tim Mann]

Hi, folks.  Those of you in the "To" line of this message have worked on
or expressed interest to me in working on either internationalizing
XBoard/WinBoard (that is, "i18n": making it ready to work with multiple
languages just by selecting a different language file at runtime), or
localizing it to particular languates (that is, "l10n": translating the
messages). Some of you have already worked on translations even in the
absence of proper internationalization support, which you did by editing
the messages in the source code and recompiling.

I've recently reorganized the XBoard project (including WinBoard) so
that more people can contribute.  We have a project site at Savannah
(the GNU alternative to SourceForge), and the source code is checked
into CVS there.  See https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/xboard/. 
Currently the code that will be released as version 4.2.7 is checked in.
After 4.2.7 is released, which I plan for late this week, the CVS
repository will be open to check in new work.

I'm writing to ask each of you whether you'd like to join the project
and work on internationalizing or localizing XBoard/WinBoard for a
future release, and what part you'd like to work on.  For those who have
done translations, please consider donating the translations you have
already done to the project even if you don't have time to work further
on the project.  That way we can use your work as a starting point.

The general plan is to use GNU gettext to do the internationalization.
See http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/gettext.html.  We need to
internationalize both XBoard and WinBoard together, so Windows-only
solutions are not acceptable.  I believe gettext will work for both X
and Windows.

There is also a lot of other XBoard/WinBoard work going on or getting
started in parallel with this effort.  Hopefully we can keep things from
getting too chaotic.  I know that more messages will be added in the
process of new development and will need to be translated, but I think
it's still the case that the sooner the internationalization part is
done, the better, and also that it would be valuable to start checking
in translations (even if only partial ones) as soon as the support is
ready.

XBoard/WinBoard is an official GNU project with copyright owned by the
Free Software Foundation.  The FSF requires that in order to put code
into the official version of one of their packages, contributors have to
formally assign the code's copyright to them.  (Or for small one-time
changes, it's OK to formally put the change into the public domain, but
that would not work for something as large as i18n/l10n.)

So if you're willing to contribute, I need to get you to sign some
papers.  I've attached an FSF questionnaire to get this process started.
You should fill it in and email to address@hidden, with a cc to me. 
They will then send you physical pieces of paper that you will need to
sign and physically mail back.

Thanks!

-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/

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