Hi Clytie, Today at 8:51, Clytie Siddall wrote:
> On 23/02/2006, at 5:09 AM, Danilo Šegan wrote: > >> By the mighty Shaun, our fellow GDP leader, we present you Gnome2 User >> Guide in translatable PO files: >> >> http://kvota.net/doc-l10n/by-modules.html#gnome2-user-guide > > This is a great move! :D I only changed it to gnome-user-guide instead of gnome*2* (to follow the package name) now. > I don't know if the GUG is the same, but when I was trying to > translate the Debian-Installer User Guide, I found the length of many > of the strings intimidating and frustrating. PO format doesn't work > very well for l-o-n-g, complex paragraphs. That's why xml2po tries to hard to split them wherever possible. Debian is not using xml2po for their own purposes, and I don't know what is their procedure. > Firstly, you struggle away for ages and end up with ... 3 strings > completed. > > Secondly, it's harder to find errors in l-o-n-g, complex paragraph > strings. Now, our stats generation is using a different PO merging script from msgmerge to provide diffs which help greatly in such situations (small changes in complex paragraphs). I've even talked about it on last GUADEC in Stuttgart, and even blogged about it here: http://danilo.segan.org/blog/prevod/po-merging-and-diffs So, simple and small fixes should be easier to track and correct in translations if you grab PO files from our status pages. > I know we need cogent strings, but I'd be strongly in favour of > splitting long or complex paragraph strings into sentence-strings, or > at least shorter strings, if that worked for the text. I've been thinking about it, and it's not too hard to implement, BUT, I'd rather have sentence-splitting in a separate tool: you sometimes need to re-order sentences in the translation and it wouldn't be possible then. > Linguistically, it should work, since a sentence is a complete > statement of its own, but that will depend on the text. ;) You sometimes also want to lose a couple of sentences, if something can be more clearly said in a translation. I figured the paragraph-level was the right choice that would work for everyone. What I can consider adding is "Sentence-Level: 0/1\n" PO header field, and deciding on that what separation level we want. But, this complicates things a bit and I won't be able to work on that anytime soon. > I must admit, I struggled through three or four of the _shorter_ DIUG > files ... and haven't been back. The longer files just intimidate me. > If their strings were broken up (correctly) more, I would take them > on. Well, the idea is to compare translation through PO files with direct translation in XML files: we are going a step at a time :) Cheers, Danilo _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list gnome-i18n@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
