3 Questions from new translator

[Mark Doliner]

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 10:00 AM, OpenSourceWay
<opensourceway at laposte.net> wrote:
> How can I know each release date (if I want send my translation 4 days
> before)

We try to announce release dates on this mailing list ahead of time,
as soon as we know an approximate date.  We don't adhere to any fixed
release schedule.

Our last few release have come from a maintenance branch
(im.pidgin.pidgin.2.x.y).  These releases have very few code changes,
and even fewer string changes (maybe around 3 obscure strings changed
between 2.10.0 and 2.10.4?).  So we haven't bothered to announce these
releases ahead of time.

Our primary development branch (im.pidgin.pidgin) is currently in a
longer development cycle.  It will eventually be released as 3.0.0,
but that is at least a few months away.  When this happens, we'll try
to let you know on this mailing list about a month ahead of time.

> Where can I see a context for each english word ? Like "DN" which is
> difficult to understand.

Very few of our strings have comments associated with them.  The
comments should appear above the string in pidgin.pot.  For everything
else, unfortunately I think you would need to find the string either
in the Pidgin UI or in the source code.

> Somebody can say if my translation is good (if I follow your phylosophy of
> translating) Old version and New version.

You can run "msgfmt -cv fr" to make sure your translation has no
mismatched format specifiers.  You can run
"XGETTEXT_ARGS=--no-location intltool-update fr" to make sure your
translation does not include line numbers (we try to avoid checking in
translations with line numbers because they cause large diffs).

Aside from that, we generally aren't able to judge the quality of a
translation.  I think only a few Pidgin developers natively speak
non-English languages.  The best we can hope for is that, once your
translation is released, users will offer suggestions or report
problems.