Re: Construction sentences with embedded widgets

[Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny eglug org>]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 08:27:48PM -0500, Stef Walter wrote:
> On 2010-09-07 11:37, Calum Benson wrote:
> > 
> > On 2 Sep 2010, at 22:57, Wouter Bolsterlee wrote:
> > 
> >> Imagine a language that requires text both before and after the
> >> position where the widget is supposed to show up. Example to
> >> demonstrate the issue I'm referring to (in English): "Forget this
> >> password after [widget-goes-here] of idle time"
> 
> Thanks Wouter for catching this.
> 
> > IIRC (although I can't see exactly where right now) the HIG
> > recommends against using such constructs, both for l10n and a11y
> > reasons, and recommends always trying to rearrange things into a more
> > conventional Label: Widget layout.  Re-using your example:
> > 
> > Idle time after which to forget password: [widget]
> 
> Good tip. However this exact wording won't work, since the text is also
> a radio button label. Please see the attached image.
> 
> Perhaps text like this would work, although (as you pointed out) it's
> far less usable:
> 
>  * Lock this keyring after an amount of time: [X ] minutes
>  * Lock this keyring after idle for an amount of time:
> 
> And in other prompts:
> 
>  * Forget this password after for an amount of time: [X ] minutes
>  * Forget this password after idle for an amount of time.
> 
> Perhaps this whole dialog needs to be redesigned? We would appreciate
> any usability advice for this dialog.
> 
> For what it's worth this layout and translation problem is not new to
> this release of GNOME, and this string has been translated (although
> perhaps suboptimally) many times.

What I do, when there is no other solution, is to find the two split
parts, translate them as a whole sentence and then split it on my own
i.e. the translation don't necessarily correspond to the source string.
Of course when not in hurry I try to report such issues, too.

Regards,
 Khaled


-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer