[Xfce-i18n] About German translations

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 21:32:46 +0200 Jannis Pohlmann wrote:

> Hey,
> 
> Am Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:29:16 +0200
> schrieb Fabian Nowak <timystery at arcor.de>:
> 
> > > Take two dialogs like 'Appearance Settings' and 'Accessibility
> > > Settings'. If one is translated as 'Erscheinungsbild' and the
> > > other is translated as 'Barrierefreiheitseinstellungen für Xfce
> > > 4' this not consistent. Personally, I'd prefer to use generic
> > > names. 'Xfce4', 'Xfce' and 'Xfce 4' doesn't have to appear
> > > everywhere. 
> > 
> > Totally agree. Was somehow on my TODO list as well. Though, we
> > should try to make it suit the menu where they are listed as well
> > as the settings dialog. I think this is where the dilemma arises
> > from.
> 
> Yeah. I was planning to talk to the other devs about this. I guess it 
> makes sense to use generic names in the desktop files as well since 
> most of them are only visible in Xfce anyway.

There's some reasoning here, but it's kinda stupid.  The .desktop files
have three (sigh, sorry about that) name strings to translate.
According to my original rationale, they go like this:

Name - full name of the dialog, don't assume anything about the desktop
environment.  Example: "Xfce 4 Desktop Settings"

GenericName - shortened name of the dialog, assuming that Xfce is
running.  Example: "Desktop Settings"

X-XfceSettingsName - super-short name of the dialog to be shown in the
settings manager.  Assumption here is that we want to take up as little
physical space as possible, and the user already knows we're talking
about Xfce and settings, so, for example: "Desktop".

In practice, though, 'Name' will never be used.  Why?  Because
our .desktop files for the settings dialogs contain "OnlyShowIn=XFCE;",
which will hide the item from any other desktop.  The Xfce menu prefers
'GenericName' when XFCE is in OnlyShowIn, or when X-XFCE is in
Categories, which is of course the case for all our dialogs.

Anybody know what GNOME does?  I don't have any core GNOME packages
installed that have settings dialogs.

Mini spec rant: the problem with all this is that OnlyShowIn just
doesn't work with modular components.  If the user is running GNOME
with xfwm4, they'll never see the xfwm4 settings dialog.  But if we
remove the OnlyShowIn, and the user is running GNOME with
metacity, but also has xfwm4 installed (maybe another user on the
machine uses Xfce, or maybe the user uses Xfce sometimes), then they'll
see "Xfce 4 Window Manager Settings" in their menu, which is
confusing (though undeniably better than two "Window Manager Settings"
entries that open different dialogs).

But then again, I suppose probably the type of user that would install
two different desktop environments or would use a foreign window
manager would understand enough of this to figure out how to get to the
right settings dialog.  Maybe.

	-brian