From kde-i18n-doc  Wed Jan 17 02:13:07 2007
From: Ian Wadham <ianw2 () optusnet ! com ! au>
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 02:13:07 +0000
To: kde-i18n-doc
Subject: Unwanted fuzzies
Message-Id: <200701171313.08082.ianw2 () optusnet ! com ! au>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-i18n-doc&m=116899997010623

In SVN branches/work/KDE4-l10n, under kdegames/kgoldrunner
there are several fuzzies (about 20) that are irrelevant and unwanted,
because the translation as it stands is perfectly good, but what
can be done about this?  As an example, in French (fr):

    #, fuzzy
    msgid "Don't Panic"
    msgstr "Pas de panique"

Presumably this would have been marked fuzzy in every language
in KDE 3.5.  Certainly, in the same KDE 4 branch, xx language has:
 
    
    #, fuzzy
    msgid "Don't Panic"
    msgstr "xxDo not Panicxx"

What happened here is that English Breakfast (EBN) scripts detected
a few months ago that there was a contraction here ("Don't").  One of
the EBN people changed it to "Do not Panic", but only did one half of
the update.  At that time there were data messages in two files: in the
game data and in a dummy program file called "data_messages.cpp".
The half-done update would have broken translation at run-time,
in every language.

So the EBN person *reverted* the change in SVN in the program file,
but by now scripty had marked "Do not Panic" as a fuzzy in every .po
(I suspect) and scripty (I also suspect) has no way to cancel a fuzzy.
There is a debate here about whether contractions should be allowed
in message files (I understand translators do not like them), but that
is not the point at issue.  Some of the other unwanted fuzzies are due,
for example, to someone putting quotes around %1 and %2.

At the moment, scripty seems to update .pot files every time the
source-text of a message changes in any way at all.  That's fine, but
should it at the same time automatically update all the .po files?

If, for example, translation teams could choose when to catch up
on .pot changes in a KDE module, some unwanted fuzzies could be
avoided and it might be easier to do a comparison to detect which
changes are substantial (new translation required) and which are
stylistic or cosmetic (i.e. you could compare this .po and previous).

But maybe I am worrying about nothing.  Cheers, Ian W.