Re: wrong translations of gconf key values

[Dwayne Bailey <dwayne translate org za>]

On Wed, 2009-01-28 at 18:55 +0100, Andre Klapper wrote:

<snip>

> Example:
> msgid "Possible values are \"always\", "\"bonded\"."
> bad msgstr "Los valores posibles son: «siempre», «vinculados».
> good msgstr "Los valores posibles son: «always» (siempre), «bonded» (vinculados)."

<snip>

> While I'm going to file bug reports for the rest of the evening I ask
> you how to avoid this. :-)
> 
> To me it's obvious by looking at the filename of the string (ending with
> ".schemas.in") that these values should not be translated, but to lots
> of other translators it's not.
> In http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=569457 aloriel proposes to
> add a comment to each of these strings.
> 
> Other opinions/comments?

Nothing is ever obvious, especially to a new translator.

There are similar problems and some solutions that we found in the
Mozilla localisation files. These allowed us to automate parts of the
Translate Toolkit.

I'd like to propose that we adopt the Mozilla idea and extend it.  The
idea is built around comments, but comments that are both human and
machine readable.

Just dealing with the issue you discovered:

#. LOCALIZATION_NOTE: DONT_TRANSLATE_WORDS (always,bonded)
msgid "Possible values are \"always\", "\"bonded\"."

The notes all start with 'LOCALIZATION_NOTE' and the type of note is
denoted next, 'DONT_TRANSLATE_WORDS'.  Its verbose but it means that a
person can read it but also a tool can be instructed to read it.  Thus a
tool would simply need to detect the presence of 'always' and 'bonded'
in the translation and fail if they are missing.

Adopting such a system required work by coders or maybe it should be
localisers since we feel the pain.  It could be easily expanded to
include things that capture setting e.g. OPTION (list,of,values), etc.

It would be easy to extend the Translate Toolkit to detect these and
flag appropriate errors.  And also relatively easy to extend Virtaal
(the translation editor we've developed) to catch those while editing.
But any automated tool requires some structured information to back it
up.  So we need to get some consensus on that first.

-- 
Dwayne Bailey
Associate                                      +27 12 460 1095 (w)
Translate.org.za                               +27 83 443 7114 (c)

Recent blog posts:
* xclip - where have you been all of my life!
http://www.translate.org.za/blogs/dwayne/en/content/xclip-where-have-you-been-all-my-life
* Virtaal on Fedora
* Translate Toolkit on Fedora.  Status of Virtaal and Pootle

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