Re: Repetitive strings in many modules

[Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress gmail com>]

On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 9:04 PM, Ask Hjorth Larsen <asklarsen gmail com> wrote:
> Hi translators and i18n people
>
> I notice that the string "Quit" seems to have appeared in quite a few
> modules.  In total, the msgids "Quit" or "_Quit" (i.e. matching
> "^(_?)Quit$") are found 31 times, in these modules:
>
>
> Why not use a stock label for this kind of stuff?  There are also many
> instances of About and _About which I don't recall from previous
> releases.
>
> Regards
> Ask


Yes, Strings like this are a good reason to use an off-line PO editor
with a good translation memory feature or an on-line tool like Pootle
that has a glosssary/terminology project.  It would be a thought to
crunch a glossary.po terminology project  for GNOME using
poternimology from theTranslate Toolkit.  At the very least, people
could download it to their local TM to help maintain consistency in
translations of certain common terms.

The main problem (as I see it) is that GNOME is not a monolithic
project.  It is a very large collection of independent projects that
strive to be interoperable.  I don't know that carving strings like
this out into a separate software package called when needed would
ever really work for the developers.  They would simply introduce the
strings they feel they need for their UI and not reference an external
source for them.  It is far too great a "social engineering" problem.

As a simply technical matter it is much easier to address this issue
by working with a local TM.

I am entirely in favor of filing i18n bugs to promote common-sense
string conventions when possible (Why have "Zoom in" and Zoom In" and
'ZOOM IN" if you can possibly agree on one string), but even then it
is a matter of getting devs to agree on one convention.

cjl