On Saturday 31 Oct 2009 12:05:30 pm sankarshan wrote:
On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Kenneth Gonsalves lawgon@au-kbc.org
wrote:
that is what I mean by manual review of the file. There are strings there that should not be translated - also strings that have been broken up and hence are untranslatable as the word order differs in Indian languages.
I apologize for the somewhat cryptic previous reply. Developers, when they are generating the .pot file, have the option of doing such marking. Doing a manual review, although feasible, becomes cumbersome with each release and, increase in number of strings for the file etc. In a similar manner, if certain terms are Trademarks etc, they can also be mentioned as a comment which makes the process of translation easy. So, even if someone does a rough cut translation via automated tools and, then decides to polish it up, the comments help a lot.
actually most Indian developers add i18n later, very few i18n their code by default. When 'bolting' i18n into their code, errors creep in which are only noticed by the translator. Once the coders get into the habit, then these problems will not occur. In this case, a manual audit by someone familiar with the code base is needed. We have a lot of duplicate strings: 'icq error', and 'ICQ error' for example. As well as the things I pointed out before. And I notice a hell of a lot of '<br>'s at the end of strings. It is a real pain to change the language and type those out. Poedit barfs if they are not included. <br> within a string is acceptable I suppose, but at the end of a string?