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

Mattias Engdegård wrote:
> Julian Foad wrote:
>> Now let's see what follow-up we need.
>>
>> Can you try it and see if it seems to be working, Mattias?
>
> Done, and it seems to work well. Some observations:

Glad to hear it, and thanks for reporting these observations.

> * As expected, lots of work to split the translated messages, although having a mostly up-to-date translation helped a great deal.

I am still concerned that some other translators might be less willing
to do this without some automated help.

> * The split into separate messages was done at empty line boundaries throughout, but for very short paragraphs (1-2 lines), it would have been more helpful to bunch a few of them together in order to get better context.
>
> * Conversely, some strings are still on the longish side. "svn propset" and "svn status" come to mind.

For these issues of paragraph length, I invite you to edit the source
text directly and make it nice.

> * I found a paragraph that I had previously forgot to translate! Buried deep in the svn merge help, of course.
>
> * stats() in shelf-cmd.c isn't very translator-friendly:
>
> info_str = apr_psprintf(scratch_pool,
> _("%s, %s ago%s\n"),
> version_str, age_str, paths_str);
>
> which is hard to translate well in several languages. At the very least, sink the "ago" part into age_str ("%d hours ago" etc). Speaking of which, the generation of age_str would benefit from using gettext plurals. That's what it's there for!

OK, done throughout 'shelve-cmd.c' in http://svn.apache.org/r1826614 and
'auth-cmd.c' in http://svn.apache.org/r1826617 . I invite you to do the
same in other files.

> * Normally, I only translate directly in the release branches and copy the result to trunk. Translating trunk normally doesn't make sense at all, since only developers use that code; it would just be a waste of time. In this case, I decided to complete the translation in trunk as well, not just for the paragraph split, to make sure that I hadn't overlooked anything.

Ack.

- Julian
Received on 2018-03-13 10:30:19 CET