Re: Mistranslations in gtk

[Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com>]

(Not subscribed to gnome-i18n, thus I only answer summarily to what I
read in the web archives...)

The choice of | as separator for the prefix was in fact inspired by the
sgettext example in the gettext manual which afaik dates back as long as
'96. So I don't think KDE can claim prior art when it comes to choosing
the prefix separator...

The idea of stripping the prefix only from untranslated messages and
relying on translators to not duplicate it in their translations also 
comes from the gettext manual, which has the following to say on the
topic:


   There is only one more comment to be said.  The wrapper function
above requires that the translations strings are not enlengthened
themselves.  This is only logical.  There is no need to disambiguate
the strings (since they are never used as keys for a search) and one
also saves quite some memory and disk space by doing this.


I don't consider this optimization to be a bug. It also has the benefit
that you can use the '|' character without problems in translations.

One improvement that I think would be possible on the gettext level 
would be if xgettext could add comments to the extracted messages 
depending on the macro that they were extracted from. That would allow
us to have a "strip everything up to (and including) the first '|'"
comment to all prefixed messages without putting tons of 
/* translators: ... */ comments in the source code.

Matthias