Re: [PATCH] Split long strings into paragraphs to ease translation

Mattias Engdegård wrote on Wed, 07 Mar 2018 16:35 +0100:
> The gettext manual recommends:
>
> Translatable strings should be limited to one paragraph; don’t let a single
> message be longer than ten lines. The reason is that when the translatable
> string changes, the translator is faced with the task of updating the entire
> translated string. Maybe only a single word will have changed in the English
> string, but the translator doesn’t see that (with the current translation
> tools), therefore she has to proofread the entire message.

There is no reason the translator should have to re-read the entire message.
If a translator translated rN fully and now HEAD == rM, the translator should run
'diff -r N:M' to see how the message changed.

That's the basic idea. A more elaborate idea would be:

1. Extract English strings from rN
2. Extract English strings from rM
3. Display a wdiff3 of (old = rN, theirs = rM, mine = the po file).

.... as I described last year: https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/subversion-dev/201702.mbox/%3C20170205204820.GA6737%40fujitsu.shahaf.local2%3E

I think the above workflow makes a lot more sense than paragraph-wise translations.

Cheers,

Daniel

P.S. I'm genuinely curious to know why the gettext manual doesn't
     recommend this approach already. Version control predates
     gettext, doesn't it?
Received on 2018-03-07 18:08:22 CET