On Tue, 23 Aug 2011, Yaron Shahrabani wrote: [...]
Since we have certain RTL issues with the Linux kernel (Hebrew is displayed in reverse) we discourage the translators to translate strings that would probably appear there
How does the Linux kernel get involved? Using Wine on the Linux console would be quite unusual. Usually it is run in a Gnome terminal, and Xterm or some other GUI equivalent. Don't these do their own handling of text independently from the Linux kernel?
Most terminal emulators doesn't support RTL besides MLTerm.
Ok, that makes more sense.
Wineconsole does not support Hebrew or Arabic script out of the box, there are several fonts that should be installed in order to enable that, AFAIK Arabic displayed in the right order but the letters are not joined, I can check that and get back to you.
Is there a bug report for this? (I did not see one in a cursory search)
[...]
The translator comments will be preserved through the updates.
I'm translating using Virtaal, meaning I can't add comments while translating and I guess other translators as well,
It looks like Virtaal needs fixing then. I did not find where one can report bugs against it so I don't know if this issue is already known to its developpers. In the meantime I find that emacs (with or without a special editing more) is nice for editing PO files but I don't know how well it works with RTL languages.
I look at comments but sometimes when I have many strings to translate I don't have much time to stop and read each and every one of them, it takes a lot of my (precious) time so for the sake of efficiency I let myself ignore some of them, so do other Hebrew translators,
Well, for Wine it must be quick since it does not have any translator or developper comment so far<g>.