Re: En-dash versus em-dash

[Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds gmail com>]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr> wrote:
> Le mardi 11 décembre 2012 à 08:49 +0700, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy a écrit :
>> On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 12:28 AM, Philip Withnall
>> <philip tecnocode co uk> wrote:
>> > Creating and maintaining an en_US locale which is identical to the C
>> > locale apart from its use of UTF-8 would be a huge amount of effort for
>> > no benefit (that I know of; please correct me if I’m wrong).
>>
>> Updating C locale just for English benefits invalidates a lot of
>> translations and translators have to go over and check all of them.
>> There are about 20 supported languages iirc versus en_US.po.
> OTOH, speaking as an occasional French translator, I think i18n teams
> may be interested if somebody provided a script to apply the changes to
> msgid *and* msgstr so that all languages follow the new rule. For
> example, French translations do not use curly quotes nor ellipses
> currently, and a script could easily fix most European languages in one
> run.
>
> Languages that do not use such characters could just have their msgid
> strings updated so that no manual work is needed.

That would be great. Translate toolkit [1] (perhaps with a bit of
enhancement) may be used for that. But I think this needs to be done
by the developers when they change the strings, not by the translators
because when the translators do it, some other content changes in
msgid may have slipped in and automation is not safe at that point.

[1] http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/index
-- 
Duy