Re: Mistranslations in gtk

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Åegan)]

Today at 18:52, Pablo Saratxaga wrote:

> Yes, it would; but please, use the already existing convention
> used in KDE instead of reinventing the wheel!
>
> It would be a big plus if that could be standardised in such a way.

This is implemented in glib: if you don't like that behaviour, you
should probably report it as a bug/RFE.  Otherwise, we want xgettext
to be able to detect "context-marked" messages, and put up a tag such
as "has-context" (it would go in PO files next to "fuzzy", "c-format"
and similar tags).  In Gnome project, we commonly rely on updates to
GNU gettext instead of introducing hacks in PO messages themselves
(look at how KDE handles ngettext-style features).

I myself would prefer if the same processing was done on translation
as is done on original strings, because translators would need no
explanation at all in such cases, and the risk of them mistranslating
it would be minimal (only if they added another context marker, i.e. "|").

I.e. translating "file|prefix" to either of "file|blahblah"
(untranslated context), "foo|blahblah" (translated context) or
"blahblah" (without context) would work correctly.  I'm interested in
a rationale for choosing current behaviour in glib: I doubt it's for
speed, because the gains are minimal IMHO.  The only justification I
see is in the case of those messages with "|" itself: for the sake of
consistency.

As for choosing "|" over any complicated scheme (like the one used in
KDE): "." works for all the world's email as a way to end DATA input
(and people use dots in email all the time :), so chopping up to first
"|" (inclusive) will work for all the Gnome's software, and it's way
easier to read for translators :)

Cheers,
Danilo