Re: Upper case messages -how to handle them?

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

fre 2005-07-22 klockan 20:13 +0200 skrev Danilo Šegan:
> Yesterday at 18:01, Nikos Charonitakis wrote:
> 
> > how translators can handle this type of messages.
> > There is no comment from devs ...
> 
> As they wish. I'd translate them. They're probably used as "put here
> your GEOMETRY" when you pass command-line arguments.  There's no harm
> in translating them.
> 
> If you ever used a command line program, you'll see that's usually the
> case (try "gnome-terminal --help" or "ls --help" and watch for FILE,
> OPTION, SIZE, GEOMETRY,...).
> 
> If there are no comments (unless missing by accident), we should
> assume the messages are not tricky and just translate them.

On the other hand, often the reason that some possibly unclear messages
do not have translator comments is because the developers simply do not
realize that the messages (or their context) may be unclear to
translators. That's not always their fault though -- it's not easy from
a developer point of view to always realize when the lack of program
context makes a message cryptic.

In those cases, the best thing you can do is probably to bug report it
in Bugzilla and kindly ask that translator comments be added to those
messages. 

I'd say that's the best thing to do in this case. As translators, we
should be careful not to assume too much about messages, but rather ask
for clarification. And the best thing to get clarification is via
translator comments, because then the explanation will be visible to
every translator, both now and in the future, when they will be facing
translating those messages.


Christian