Proposal for string improvements

[Stephan Arts]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 8:13 PM, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> 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...

Not even in a dialog stating:

'YOU SHOULD NOT DO THAT!!!!!1111eleven' ?

^_^

-
Stephan