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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: comments
From:       "Thomas Diehl" <th.diehl () gmx ! net>
Date:       1999-06-03 5:27:27
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On Wed, 02 Jun 1999 20:37:02 +0200, Stephan Kulow wrote:

>Aaron Levinson (I'm sure I got this name wrong, so please
>make him not reading this list ;) [author of kmp3] had the
>idea to comment his .pot file with usefull comments for the
>translator. 

You are wrong: you got his name right. ;) And I also think it's a great
idea. The context problem (next lack of consistency) is probably the
single most important one when translating GUIs. In the German
translation, for instance, we have a total ridiculous translation for
"home" in some dialogs because I thought the lib PO was talking about
the keyboard (the "home" key as opposed to "end") instead of the "home
directory". ;)

I'm not sure, however, that Aaron's examples give a good picture of
what we would really need in the PO(T)s. I don't think there are too
many doubts as to what "left" and "right" are supposed to mean and I
guess we wouldn't like to see explanations of the ampersands in every
single PO -- the overall file size there is big enough already and we
should avoid useless bloat as much as we can. Esp. since most languages
probably have ambiguities and translation problems that others won't
have and which would be useless to spread over all the POs. 

Probably the most helpful comments may come from documenters who do
final context and consistency checks of their stuff while having the
actual program running in front of them, doing screenshots and so on.
That's the moment when the nonsense becomes most evident and PO(T)
comments should be inserted to help others.

>I'm quite sure that most developers won't have the time
>to comment their pot file themselfs, but may be open for
>questions ;)

They should. One could even expect they do this job themselves and we
would only have to add something here and there from our perspective. I
know this is naive, but nevertheless it's true.

>P.S. It needs some more testing, so please be patient with
>my code.

I really appreciate what you've done there.

Thomas

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