Re: Would it save time for translators to fold similar lines?

["Thomas Thurman" <tthurman gnome org>]

On 02/12/2007, Robert-André Mauchin <zebob m pengzone org> wrote:
> I don't think this is a good idea. Actually we do translate the \"top\"
> and other attributes to give informations about it. For example in
> french translation :
>
>         #: ../src/theme-parser.c:1540
>         #, c-format
>         msgid "No \"top\" attribute on element <%s>"
>         msgstr "Aucun attribut « top » (« haut ») sur l'élément <%s>"

Ah, I see what you mean. A brief overview of the languages used in
Metacity shows that, for theme-parser.c:1547:

Languages which contain the keyword "bottom" and clearly (to me) don't
translate it at all: be latin ca cs da de es eu fi hu it lt nb nl pl
pt ro ru sk sl sr Latn sr sv th uk

Languages which include the word "bottom" and also translate it: fr vi

Languages where the question doesn't make sense because "bottom" means
the same thing as in en_US: en_CA en_GB

Languages which are so different from any I know that I can't make a
reasonable guess were excluded from the count. However, these
languages do not contain the string "bottom" at all, which necessarily
means they are erroneous; most of them contain a quoted string which
is presumably a direct translation: ar pa pt_BR ta

Given all this, I suppose there are three avenues we may take:

1) Decide that it is best if error messages don't attempt to translate
keywords for users, and make a general policy that the manual is the
place for such information (as almost all languages are already
doing). This would have the useful side-effect of fixing at a stroke
the problem posed by the languages which don't give the actual
keywords at all.

2) Decide to leave it up to the translators, and make a general policy
that developers should provide places to translate each keyword (so in
almost all languages "bottom" the Metacity theme keyword would be
"bottom", but in French it would be "« bottom » (« bas »)").

3) Do nothing and leave things as they are.

T