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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: Semantic tags in KDE4
From:       Luciano Montanaro <mikelima () cirulla ! net>
Date:       2007-04-27 21:55:53
Message-ID: 200704280003.19408.mikelima () cirulla ! net
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On venerd́ 27 aprile 2007, Chusslove Illich wrote:
> > [: Nicolas Goutte :]
> > How is it supposed to work? Do you really want to pass all messages
> > ("all" in KDE5, not in KDE4) through a preprocessor similar to Qt's
> > richtext?
>
> Yes.
>
> I don't think performance can be a problem.
>
> The semantic tags would just map to either quotes or Qt's rich text (which
> is subset of HTML). The context marks would decide between using rich and
> plain text (based on <qt> tag usage, I plan rich text for @info, plain for
> others).
>
> > The problem I see is that it is again an obstacle to start a KDE
> > translation. (or for a new translator to join a team).
> > [...]
> > [...] avoid translators used to GNU projects to have to re-learn
> > everything before translating KDE.
>
> Hm, I'd say just the opposite.
>
> Translators should only know not to touch the tags (which is pretty
> natural, and as they had to know till now anyway), and nothing else.
>
> As a plus, gone would be the troubles with custom quotes (translation
> coordinators/reviewers having to correct this for less experienced
> members), and yet worse problems for some teams (I remember Yukiko telling
> that she must avoid use of both italic and bold tags in Japanese
> translation).

I see this proposal can be useful, but also make things difficult.
For:
- It annotates the text, so that the translator knows if a message has 
  to be short (action), or if it may be a bit longer (info)
- It may help disambiguate some phrases, where the tag clarifies the 
  sense of the message
- It may be used to present more typographically pleasant messages, with, 
  for example, appropriate quotes for the argument at hand.
- The annotation may also be used by text-to-speech engines to give 
  proper intonation (or to pronounce differently part of the text, like urls)

Agains:
- Some of the translator may be confused by the tags, and may try to 
  translate also those. This may not be a problem for those used with 
  documentation translation, but documentation is already skipped by 
  most teams.
- If the translator forgets to close a tag, or mistypes a tag, the user 
  will see garbage. Probably not a problem in common interface messages, 
  but with, say, rarely presented error messages, it may be a problem.

Luciano

-- 
Luciano Montanaro //
                \X/ mikelima@cirulla.net

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