Re: Markup in messages

["Abel Cheung" <abelcheung gmail com>]

On 7/18/06, Christian Rose <menthos gnome org> wrote:
> Behdad, this is about http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347110
> -- it was only recently that I discovered that you have included a
> section about markup to http://live.gnome.org/GnomeI18nDeveloperTips :
>
> "Following is a list of examples that need to be marked for
> translation, but were not in some cases:
> [...]
> '<b>%s</b>': That is an innocent way to mark something to make it
> boldface in the interface, to emphasize importance or make it a
> header. But not every language has a concept of modern boldface
> typefaces, or even if it has such fonts, they may not be the preferred
> font for such kind of emphasis."
>
> So are you suggesting that developers include the surrounding markup
> in the translateable message, in case you may need to change it for
> Persian for rendering purposes?

My guess is that they are just reluctant to changing anything
not visually beneficial, not that they have already foreseen
the problem. But to make an excuse, this is a good
one, especially when what Behdad said is valid. I have been
bitten by this kind of markup/font issues myself.

Due to absense of freely available boldface Chinese font, I
have seen somebody translate things like:

msgid "<b>%s</b>"
msgstr "<i>%s</i>"

in order to distinguish it from normal text.

Of course in most cases the proper 'fix' is to have a boldtype
font. But creating a boldface font is not always that easy,
when one is talking about complex scripts that consists of
at least hundreds or thousands of glyphs; and it needs quite
some human horsepower as well, which may not be available for
newly available languages in F/OSS world.

Abel

> Christian
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> gnome-i18n gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n


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Abel Cheung   (GPG Key: 0xC67186FF)
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