Proposal for string improvements

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Vincent wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 10:55 AM, Juha <kautto.juha at kolumbus.fi> wrote:

>> I/f seeing a short string of text out of context might be confusing for
>> a translator, include a short context description at the start of the
>> string, and separate it from the "real" string with the pipe character
>> ("|||"). Gettext will strip off the context for you when displaying the
>> string in the user interface./
>>
>> I think we should not do that, but instead add a short comment on top of
>> that text. The comment will be visible for the translator in the PO file
>> and it can be much longer than the short explanation after that |. Also
>> I have seen that most translators do not know what that "|" means, but
>> they simply translate also that text, which causes nasty and unnecessary
>> translation bugs.

Ok, didn't realise.  I'll change that.

> Agreed. I didn't know what it was (though perhaps a "translator's guide"
> would be in order too :P). I'm not sure how much trouble it is to add a
> comment, but those are very clear.

No, adding a comment is actually probably even easier than using a weird 
string construct.

> Apart from that, the style guide looks really nice, though it could perhaps
> use a note about the use of exclamation marks (especially more than one).

I'd actually say you'd just about never want to use exclamation marks in 
our UI, perioud, let alone more than one consecutively...

	-b