Re: gnome goals for 3.6

[F Wolff <friedel translate org za>]

Op Di, 2012-05-15 om 21:17 -0400 skryf Matthias Clasen:
> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Piotr Drąg <piotrdrag gmail com> wrote:
> 
> > What about strings with embedded markup, like this one: "Unfortunately
> > GNOME 3 failed to start properly and started in the <i>fallback
> > mode</i>"? Are they also supposed to be changed in some way?
> 
> These cases are tricky.
> Sometimes you can eliminate the markup by doing something like
> 
> s = g_strdup_printf ("<i>%s</i>", _("fallback mode"));
> /* Translators, %s stands for 'fallback mode' here */
> msg = g_strdup_printf _("Unfortunately GNOME 3 failed to start
> properly and started in the %s"), s);
> 
> But this is considerably more clumsy than the embedded markup version,
> and you may well introduce memory leaks and new 'split string'
> translation issues this way.
> 
> Use your judgement.

I think this is already dangerous, since it assumes the emphasized
(italic) section will be contiguous. If a translator needs to split it
for whatever reason, it won't be easy with a variable.

On the whole topic of removing XML tags: cleaner strings are nicer to
translate. We should take care not to make too many decisions for
translators. We should maybe have a survey about things like bold and
underline markup: I've heard of translators never using underline for
languages with dots or other diacritics below letters, and I've heard
that font support can sometimes cause problems with bold (probably
mostly at smaller sizes). I think we should strive for clean, commented
and well reviewed strings, but I don't think it is unreasonable for
translators to handle little bits of XML.

Also: Maybe we should rather make this a focus of newer strings in order
to avoid fuzzying strings already translated into many languages or
risking regressions.

Friedel



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