Marking strings for translation

Jasper Huijsmans jasper at xfce.org
Wed Aug 25 20:59:59 CEST 2004


Hey all,

I have been updating the Dutch translations and there were a few things 
I'd like to mention. These are of course opinions, not objective truths.

1. Can we try to avoid putting markup in translations? E.g., 
<b>Workspace</b> and <i>Workspace</i> are not really different ...

2. When a translator has to use copy/paste a lot, there may be room for 
improvement. E.g, in the shortcut editor: Move to workspace 1, Move to 
workspace 2, Move to ... ;-)

3. Using too short sentences are hard to translate without context. For 
instance "printing", I think either that string should be expanded, or a 
comment added above the statement, so that is will show up in the po file.

4. We're doing pretty well here, but for technical terms and format 
strings a comment explaining the context can be very useful.

5. Consistent use of semicolon, question mark, exclamation mark. 
Sometimes we add a space, sometimes we don't. Probably we should not add 
the space, that's how it's done in normal English texts (corret me if 
I'm wrong). Exclamation marks should probably never be used (no shouting).

6. Consistent terminology, this is hard and I'm often quite uncertain 
about the right words to use. E.g., options, settings, preferences, 
properties.

Ok, well, it's nothing really big, just something to think about every 
once in a while. Better not go and change too many strings now anyway, 
because of the freeze. I just thought I'd write it now, before I forget 
again.

cheers,
	Jasper



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