Re: Improve translations in Mallard

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2011-10-24 at 00:18 +0200, Chusslove Illich wrote:
> > [: Shaun McCance :]
> > We've been slowly transitioning our documents to itstool.
> > [...]
> > You see this:
> >
> > #: C/account-jabber.page:59(title/gui)
> 
> While intltool does this too, it shouldn't be done. PO processing tools, be
> it PO editors or whatever else, have no obligation to consider and parse
> such comments.

Are there any processing tools that actually have a problem with this?

>  A source reference comment, according to de-facto PO format
> reference (Gettext manual), should contain only file names and line numbers,
> i.e. #: file1:lno1 file2:lno2 .... Anything else should go into extracted
> comments. For example:
> 
>   #: C/account-jabber.page:59
>   #. tag-path: title/gui

The problem I see with that is that the tag path is no longer tied to
the file that defined it. That's fine when strings only appear once,
but how about this:

#: C/some-topic.page:42
#: C/another-topic.page:17
#. tag-path: title/gui
#. tag-path: td/p

Which is which? Maybe it doesn't matter that much. I don't know. I'm
not a translator. I'm just trying to make things easier.

On the other hand, putting the path on its own line would make longer
paths less painful, so we could perhaps do a full path, or a path up
to the closest sectioning element. That might be helpful.

On the other other hand, gettext defines and treats PO files in a way
that's not really nice to third-party tools. I'd love to put some info
in #, comments (e.g. marking a message transliteration-only), but the
fact that it's a controlled vocabulary prevents me. I'd rather not put
more and more stuff in #. comments, because it's going to get in the
way of actual comments to translators at some point.

Open to discussion on all this. These tool are there to make your jobs
easier.

--
Shaun