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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    How to make your translators lives easier
From:       Aaron Levinson <alevinsn () inetarena ! com>
Date:       1999-05-28 5:23:12
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Last week, I spent two hours or so commenting the majority of the strings
in the base Kmp3 POT file to help translators out.  There are roughly 200
user-visible strings in Kmp3.  I also wrote a script to merge the comments
with already-translated POT files with minimum hassle (i.e. comments don't
get duplicated over and over again....).  So far, I've received a number
of responses from translators saying how much it helped them and how much
they wish other developers would do it.  Erik K. Pedersen, head of the
Danish KDE translation team, had this to say:

"It was a wonderful idea to have the po-file commented the way you did.
When you do translations it is always out of context, and other languages
are different grammatically from English. English is actually particularly
difficult in this context because it is hard to know whether something is
a verb or a noun. You really should suggest this to some of the other
kde-developers. It makes an enormous difference in the accuracy of
translations."

Certainly, no one is going to require KDE developers to comment POT files
to aid translators, but there are a number of reasons why it's a good
idea:

1.  The translations are of higher quality
2.  The translators are happier (which possibly makes them more likely to
    contribute in the future)
3.  The end-users are happier (no messy translations!)
4.  The developer only has to do the comments ONCE, but the benefits are
    reaped for ALL languages
5.  The developer's writing skills improve :-)

Well, you get the point :-).

Aaron Levinson

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