[Freeipa-devel] i18n infrastructure improvements

[John Dennis]

On 01/11/2013 02:44 PM, Jérôme Fenal wrote:
> 2013/1/11 John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com <mailto:jdennis at redhat.com>>

Thank you Jérôme for your insights as a translator. We have a lop-sided 
perspective mostly from the developer point of view. We need to better 
understand the translator's perspective.

>     I'm not sure how splitting text into smaller units gives more
>     context but I can see the argument for each msgid being a logical
>     paragraph. We don't have too many multi-paragraph strings now so it
>     shouldn't be too involved.
>
>
> One issue also discussed on this list is the problem of 100+ lines
> strings in man pages generated from ___doc___ tags in scripts.
> Those are a _real_ pain for translators to maintain when only one line
> is changed.

I still think TX should attempt to match the msgid from a previous pot 
with an updated pot and show the *word* differences between the strings 
along with an edit window for the original translation. That would be so 
useful to translators I can't believe TX does not have that feature. All 
you would have to do is make a few trivial edits in the translation and 
save it.

But heck, I'm not a translator and I haven't used the translator's part 
of the TX tool much other than to explore how it works (and that was a 
while ago).


> I'd see a few remarks here:
> - this massive .po file would grow wildly, especially when a typo is
> corrected in huge strings (__doc___), when additional sentences are
> added to those, etc.
> - breaking down bigger strings in smaller ones will certainly help here
> in avoiding duplicated content,

> - in Transifex, it is easy to upload a .po onto another branch, and only
> untranslated matching strings would be updated. I used it on ananconda
> where there are multiple branches between Fedora & RHEL5/6 & master,
> that worked easily without breaking anything.

When you say easy to upload a .po onto another branch I assume you don't 
mean branch (TX has no such concept) but rather another TX resource. 
Anyway this is good to know, perhaps the way TX handles versions is not 
half as bad as it would appear.

-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>

Looking to carve out IT costs?
www.redhat.com/carveoutcosts/