Re: economy in translations

[Ihar Hrachyshka <ihar hrachyshka gmail com>]

On Sun, 2010-02-21 at 18:20 +0000, Stephen Brown wrote:
> On 21 February 2010 16:56, Nils-Christoph Fiedler
> <fiedler medienkompanie de> wrote:
> > hej folks,
> >
> > i have a little question about economy in translating software.
> > busy as a bee, we're translating every single line / string of software.
> > but isn't there a possibility, technically, to just write a big library
> > or a "super-giga-master.po"-file, which includes all of the strings,
> > instead of translating equal strings in different software again and
> > again? i mean even in one file some terms appear more than one time and
> > e.g. the strings "File", "Edit" or "View" also occur in nearly every
> > lib. i guess we could save a hundreds of hours of translating.
> > so this might be a stupid question from a translator to a developer, but
> > isn't it possible, that strings in software referr to one big catalog,
> > instead of one .po for every single application?
> >
> > kind regards,
> > nils
> >
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> >
> 
> Often the same word has different meanings.
> e.g File (a peice of paper)[noun] and File (to file something away)[verb]

So you can of course concatenate existing po files in one large
'compendium' [1] and then preprocess [2] new files with it. It can speed
up your work a little but you should do more QA work to make sure your
UI shows the needed translations in menus etc.

1: http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/pocompendium
2: man 1 msgmerge

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