Re: Plone's gettext approach and its impact on translation

Op 25-10-10 11:54, Roché Compaan schreef:
> Find below some feedback from Dwayne Bailey on Plone's gettext approach.
> I've copied him again so he stays part of any discussion that might
> follow.

Hi Dwayne,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and concerns with us.  I will give my 
perspective as programmer.

I am under the impression, that using msgids is preferable to using the 
source text directly, at least when this source text is a bit long. 
That way, a restructuring of the original text, or simply fixing a typo, 
does not lead to fuzzy translations.

When you have this:

# Default: Hello Worlt
msgid "msg_hello_world"
msgstr "Hallo wereld"

and someone fixes the typo in the original English and regenerates the 
po files, you get this:

# Default: Hello World
#, fuzzy
msgid "msg_hello_world"
msgstr "Hallo wereld"

Now the translator only needs to look at the new default, conclude that 
the existing translaton is still fine and remove the fuzzy remark. 
Compare that to this:

msgid "Hello Worlt"
msgstr "Hallo wereld"

After fixing the typo in the Plone code and syncing with the po file, 
this would become:

msgid "Hello World"
msgstr ""

and the translator needs to translate the string completely new.  Not 
hard for these two words, but it gets annoying when you have long 
sentences to translate.

(Okay, if I notice this when fixing the typo, I try to make sure I 
simply fix the typo in the po files as well, so that neither a fuzzy 
remark gets added, nor msgstrings removed.)


As for special po-editors: I am fine with using a normal text editor 
---as far as you can call Emacs normal ;-)--- but then I am a programmer.


I won't defend how we are doing things, but as a programmer who only has 
experience with how translations are done in Plone, I am fine with the 
current situation.

That said, it might be that we are inadvertently scaring away competent 
translators by the way we are handling things now, so that translations 
are left to programmers, who might use language that scares away end 
users or might not translate at all.


-- 
Maurits van Rees
Programmer, Zest Software


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