Re: make localisation easier use more stock items (use them everywhere)

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sat, 19 Mar 2005, Richard Hoelscher wrote:

> Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 09:48:41 -0600 (CST)
> From: Richard Hoelscher <rah rahga com>
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
> Cc: games-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: make localisation easier use more stock items (use them
>         everywhere)
>
> Alan Horkan said:
> <snip>
> > I forgot to mention my disappointment that GTK doesn't seem to include a
> > stock item for the top level View menu, which was one of things I noticed
> > was inconsistently translated.
>
> For what it's worth, just because it looks inconsistently translated
> doesn't mean it is.

You are going to have to explain what you mean by that.

> Back to your original mail, things "Pause" and "Pause
> game" from Mahjongg are in the list of translatable strings, but not
> because the original coder didn't use stock items and or he was confused
> about which string to use.

Okay, took me a while to get what exactly you meant here.  I was looking
first at the games and looking at the menu items, I only glanced at the
.po file.

> It's there because there's no available stock
> items for a toolbar "Pause" toggle item with a "Pause game" tooltip...
> Mahjongg's the only game with that feature.

As far as I know using a stock item shouldn't prevent setting a
custom tooltip or does it?

> >> I am uneasy about replacing New Game with New. The basic problem is that
> >> the resulting stock icon is a sheet of paper.
> >
> > There should be some way to override this, and I'll have to look into it.

> I'd also recommend against replacing "New Game" with "New", because the
> context provided by the former could lead to a different and much more
> accurate translation depending on the language... Very similar to
> reasoning found in Bug #160583.

"could lead"?  please be specific.

You have shown that a stock item cannot be used for Play but even then it
might be better if we were to ask the French translators of Gnome to use a
more generic term, in English we could just as easily use the term "Start"
to cover all these contexts.  Better internationalisation work will mean
less localisation work.  (Although there are times with Localisation where
you really need to carefully tailor the details I dont believe this is one
of them.)

That one case is not reason enough not to try using a stock item for New
or Pause without more information.  Although I can understand that "new
game" and "new document" might have different genders in some languages I
would be surprised at a language that cannot express "New (things)" and
make use of a generic fallback.

I think it is better to try and find out if there are problems than not to
try at all which I fear is what it sounds like you would prefer.

> As far as the "View" stock item, I think that'll be taken care of anyway
> once gnome-games moves stock items internally, which is planned Real Soon
> Now (tm) anyway. All I'm saying is don't file a libgnomeui bug for it,
> since it won't take. :)

Most things that would really be worth filing against libgnomeui would be
better filed against GTK (and the bits not worth filing against libgnomeui
they should be centralised in gnome-games).  I'm glad to see the progress
that has been reducing all the unnecessary Gnome specific code.  I like
clean portable code.  I would be very reluctant to add to Gnome specific
code it if it could be avoided.  The point of this whole thread is about
my wanting to make a cleaner abstraction and make better use of existing
work in GTK.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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