Re: [Po4a-devel][CVS] po4a/lib/Locale/Po4a Xml.pm,NONE,1.1
On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 12:34:51AM +0200, Jordi Vilalta wrote:
On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Denis Barbier wrote:
[...]
> This would require a comment being added to PO files to let
translators
> know how to deal with this msgid, and my experience is that translators
> hardly read such comments, because they use tools which do not display
> them (kbabel, gtranslator, poedit, etc, very few of them handle comments
> in a useful way).
I've been using poedit and it shows them well.
There are 2 kinds of comments: those extracted from sources, and
translator's comments. IIRC poedit was messing up those comments,
there were discussions on Debian lists few months ago about this
bug.
But I agree with you on the
translators behavior about the comments.
> This attribute may be automagically added, e.g. including translations
> from xx.po could set lang="xx".
With this you're forcing the name of the po file, not much interesting in
some cases. And there's also another issue: there can be a language
without the translated DocBook templates, and they may want to set the
lang attribute to any arbitrary language.
I do not see your point here, sorry. Note also that AFAICT your
solution below does not handle that case.
There's also the possibility to have more than one lang
attribute
(with different values) around the document.
They can be created by reading all *.po files.
I think that another solution would be to create artificial msgids:
"TRANSLATE ONLY AFTER THE ':'\n
THIS IS THE VALUE OF THE aaa ATTRIBUTE OF THE ttt TAG: en"
I tried this approach, and some translators did translate those msgids ;)
Maybe this isn't very friendly to pure translators, but I think
that
software translators should have a minimal idea about the format they're
translating (see the 'E<lt>' stuff in the extracted strings from the man
pages).
I slightly disagree, my experience with po-debconf (a Debian specific
tool) is that such tricks confuse some translators, so the question is:
do we want a l10n framework usable by everybody, or by experienced
users? IMO extra complexity should be added only when there is no other
choice.
I did not yet read the thread about the 'E<lt>' stuff, but these escapes
appear in msgids, this is different from diverting msgids from their
original role (ie. having msgid/msgstr handle original and translated
strings).
While we are talking about complexity, plural forms is a very hard
topic, maybe it should be discussed too.
Denis