[gcompris-devel] Please reduce the number of markup in messages marked for translation

[Christian Rose]

Hi.

There seems to be two messages in gcompris that have recently been
marked up with HTML. Below is one of them.

#: src/boards/clickgame.c:250
msgid ""
"<b>Goal:</b>\n"
"<br>In this game, the children will discover the computer mouse.\n"
"<br>The goal is just to click with the left mouse button on the moving
"
"fish.\n"
"<p>\n"
"<b>Credits:</b>\n"
"<br>Fish are taken from the Unix utility xfishtank.\n"
"<br>Images are taken from the National Undersearch Research Program
(NURP) "
"Collection at <a
href=\"http://www.photolib.noaa.gov\">http://www.photolib."
"noaa.gov</a>.\n"
"<br>All images credit bellongs to the OAR/National Undersea Research
Program "
"(NURP).\n"
"<br>Except for the first image that also credits the University of
North "
"Carolina at Wilmington.\n"
"<br>In the gcompris level order, images information is:\n"
"<ul><li>Location: Tropical Atlantic Ocean, Florida Keys (image
nur00523) "
"Photographer: D. Kesling</li>\n"
"<li>Location: Florida Keys (image nur03006)</li>\n"
"<li>Location: Unknown (image nur03505)</li>\n"
"<li>Location: Unknown (image nur03010)</li>\n"
"<li>Location: Unknown (image nur03011)</li>\n"
"<li>Location: Unknown (image nur03013)</li></ul>"


In cases like this, please try to reduce the markup marked for
translation wherever possible, i.e. try to move the markup out of the
_() calls, and only include what should be translated in the _(). Also,
a splitup of the message blurb above in several messages is probably
appropriate, since the parts of it are fairly independant.

What I mean by "moving markup out" is that instead of:

  printf(_("<b>Foo Bar Baz</b>"));

using this is much better:

  printf("<b>",_("Foo Bar Baz"),"</b>");

Well, you get the idea.
There are several reasons for this:

* Translators are expected to translate everything marked for
translation. If you include lots of markup and some of it also gets
"translated" by accident, you shouldn't blame the translator. ;-)
In other words, including markup increases the danger of accidental
errors.
* Including lots of markup makes it more difficult for translators and
reviewers to read and verify the translations
* Including markup makes it more difficult to re-use existing
translations for words and common sentences using translation databases


Christian