Re: Improve translations in Mallard

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sun, 2011-10-23 at 12:27 +0200, Gil Forcada wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I added a couple of bugs to Yelp regarding mallard translations.

Hi Gil,

Thanks for the reports. It's valuable to know what's helpful to you.
The bugs you filed were from PO files generated by xml2po. We've been
slowly transitioning our documents to itstool. There are differences.

> In [1] I ask for adding msgctxt to all Mallard strings so that the (p),
> (title) and other hints that are easily seen by the translators as are
> now that are only available on the source reference.

With itstool, the line that tells you file and line number for the
messages gives you to levels of element context. So instead of this:

#: C/account-jabber.page:59(gui)

You see this:

#: C/account-jabber.page:59(title/gui)

Which is more useful in a lot of cases. Maybe three levels would be
better sometimes.

itstool can set msgctxt for nodes. We use it to distinguish secondary
title types right now. I'm wary of using this too much though. It can
really get unwieldy if we start automatically setting msgctxt for all
nodes.

We can also set comments automatically based on what nodes the message
came from. If there are common cases where extra information would be
valuable, we can add custom ITS rules for those.

> In [2] I ask for filtering comments on translations, since I suppose
> that are only useful for the documentation team and doesn't make any
> sense to translate (prove me wrong though).

itstool already gets this right. With itstool, we have the ability
to mark things as non-translatable. We can do this node-by-node in
a document (e.g. marking a code block non-translatable) or with the
global ITS rules (e.g. all Mallard comment elements). And the global
ITS rules already mark Mallard comments non-translatable.

--
Shaun