Re: Context in translations, Q_() and gettext

["Kenneth Nielsen" <k nielsen81 gmail com>]

Hello everyone

During the last 2-3 years where I have been involved in translations, we have had just a handful (Total! only 1 or 2 in Gnome) of really serious translations errors, of the kind that affects user experience. And of these ~5 errors, probably 4 of them have been caused by wrongly translated strings with context. One case was with the de facto standard pipe character construction in a Gnome package and some in "Battle for wesnoth" where they use a "context^string" construction. These errors have regrettably passed proofreading, a point which seriously deflated my evaluation of how good I am at proofreading ;( .

The point of all this (besides my bruised ego off course *G*) is that I think it would be a very good idea to make this transition. I think it will prevent errors (not just for my team though) and It will make the translation process a little easier since it'll mean one less really important thing we need to learns new translators. Furthermore it really seems a shame to use the kind of hack-solution we do now, when there actually are built a real solution for it in gettext. Making the change in gnome will off course not directly solve the problem in external projects like say "Battle for wesnoth", but it will mean that there will be a lot more people around that have experience with how to use these features, and so it will slowly spread anyway.
So nothing but the warmest recommendations from me to make this a Gnome goal and start implementing it.
Regards Kenneth Nielsen (Danish translation team)