Questionable quality translatable strings

[Lucian Adrian Grijincu <lucian grijincu gmail com>]

I know you requested a bug for things that need fixed, but I'm trying
to get the attention of all developers that are contributing
user-visible strings. Hopefully this will be the last message on this
theme.

I don't know if you're aware of this but you have been recently added
to the "Damn Lies" translation project
http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/ro/gnome-3-0/ui/.
You will most surely see translations trickling in even though GNOME
is not yet in string freeze.

It would be nice if you could spend a bit of time looking over the
translatable strings.
They are only 194 as of now. But there are a very large number of
GNOME languages.
Reviewing strings now will save a lot of later work and make things
easier for translators.


To me, a large part of the messages outputed by Rygel seem more like
debugging, or error logging messages than user notifications.

Please have a look at
  http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/DevGuidelines
or at least at the "What should be localized?" page:
  http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/DevGuidelines/What%20should%20be%20localized%3F




I'll continue with a list of "bad" example strings and some comments.




  ../src/plugins/media-export/rygel-media-export-root-container.vala:374
ID %s no longer in config, deleting...
-- not correct in English.
-- is "config" a configuration file? If so could you make it clearer?


  ../src/plugins/media-export/rygel-media-export-root-container.vala:405
Already harvesting; cancelling
-- cancelling what? Please expand if this string really needs to be
seen by the user.


  ../src/plugins/mediathek/rygel-mediathek-rss-container.vala:103
Requesting change since %s
-- it's not clear what you're requesting. Are you requesting data from
RSS that have changed since some date? Is %s a date?


These strings seem more like debugging messages for me:
  ../src/plugins/mediathek/rygel-mediathek-video-item.vala:64
group node has no 'url' property

  ../src/plugins/mediathek/rygel-mediathek-video-item.vala:69
invalid or no namespace


  ../src/rygel/rygel-live-response.vala:214
Error from pipeline %s: %s
-- what pipeline? This also seems more like a debugging message than a
string addressed to the user.


No icon provided by plugin '%s'. Using Rygel logo..
-- For ellipsis use "..." or, preferably, the Unicode ellipsis "…".
Here I guess a full stop "." would be best.
-- Is this really a string the user cares about?


  ../src/rygel/rygel-meta-config.vala:266
../src/rygel/rygel-meta-config.vala:285
No value set for '%s/enabled'
-- what is %s? Why the "/". Please provide a sample message and an
explanation as a comment if this should be seen by the user.



What is playbin, playbin2 and why does a normal user care? Is this a
logging message?

#: ../src/plugins/media-export/rygel-media-export-metadata-extractor.vala:105
 "Checking for gstreamer playbin..."

#: ../src/plugins/media-export/rygel-media-export-metadata-extractor.vala:108
 "Using playbin2"

#: ../src/plugins/media-export/rygel-media-export-metadata-extractor.vala:110
 "Could not create Playbin2, trying Playbin"

#: ../src/plugins/media-export/rygel-media-export-metadata-extractor.vala:114
 "Using playbin"

#: ../src/plugins/media-export/rygel-media-export-metadata-extractor.vala:116
 "Could not find any playbin."



#: ../src/plugins/media-export/rygel-media-export-query-container.vala:118
 "We have %u child."
 "We have %u children."
-- it's not really clear what kind of children you're talking about.
Is this a XML/tree parent-child relationship? Are these fork()
parent/child processes? Or what?
-- Who is this "we" person?


#: ../src/plugins/tracker/rygel-tracker-insertion-query.vala:70
#: ../src/plugins/tracker/rygel-tracker-selection-query.vala:73
msgid "Executing SPARQL query: %s"
-- it's not really clear to me why a user would be interested in this message.

#: ../src/rygel/rygel-browse.vala:121
msgid "Invalid Arguments"
msgid "Invalid Request"
msgid "Invalid Range '%s'"
-- Are the words accidentally capitalized or is there a reason?



There are others, but I hope you get what I'm trying to say.

-- 
 .
..: Lucian