Re: Unicode typography in translations

[Ask Hjorth Larsen <asklarsen gmail com>]

Hi Rafael

2016-11-15 2:26 GMT+01:00 Rafael Fontenelle <rafaelff gnome org>:
> 2016-11-14 12:31 GMT-02:00 Piotr Drąg <piotrdrag gmail com>:
> > Hello translators,
> >
> > You might have noticed a lot of changes in master branches regarding
> > the use of Unicode typography. GNOME HIG has recommendations for
> > English:
> >
> > https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/typography.html
> >
> > I have been submitting patches for implementing these recommendations
> > in the original strings:
> >
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=772263
> >
> > This is a great opportunity to improve our translations! For example,
> > I have been using ASCII typography (characters you can input with your
> > keyboard: " ", ..., - etc.) in Polish translations for years. This is
> > actually incorrect, and for some time now I use proper Unicode
> > characters that the language's rules dictate: „ ”, …, — etc.
> >
> > It is slightly more work for me, sure, but as HIG puts it, it
> > drastically improves the impression given by your applications. I
> > believe some copy and pasting is worth the effort. Here is some info
> > on other ways to input Unicode:
> >
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input#In_X11_.28Linux_and_other_Unix_variants.29
> >
> > Naturally, every language has different typography rules. I encourage
> > you to look into your language's and consider the change.
> >
> > As a final note, I don't believe there are any technical reasons to
> > avoid Unicode these days, so you shouldn't worry about that. If an app
> > crashes because of UTF-8, then it is a bug that needs to be reported
> > and fixed.
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > --
> > Piotr Drąg
> > https://piotrdrag.fedorapeople.org
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-i18n mailing list
> > gnome-i18n gnome org
> > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
>
>
>
> It would be nice to have a script with regexp that could compare msgstr and
> msgid in a PO file, and report strings that are not in compliance with
> GNOME's HIG typography.  I don't have such scripting skill, but if someone
> has it, please consider do it.
>
> Regards,
> Rafael Fontenelle

It is easy to recognize when the English string contains something,
and the translated string does not (e.g. to find a unicode ellipsis
that was translated to an ASCII ellipsis).  But if the English string
uses ASCII, it is not always easy.  For example recognizing exactly
when the en-dash could or should be used instead of an ASCII hyphen.

It is probably a good assumption that any sequence of exactly three
dots should be a unicode ellipsis, no matter the context, but that's
the only trivial case.

Best regards
Ask