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

[Bruno Coudoin]

Thanks for your information.
To those that followed the story, I recently converted the help system
in gcompris to use gtkhtml.
Unfortunaly, it brings a lot of drawbacks and the translation one is
just one more.
GTKHTML brings many dependancies and created many configuration
compilation, issues. It is rather slow to be displayed and does not
allow loading of images anyway until probably you implement some
additional code (and gcompris will become a browser).

For all these reasons, I think it is best to go back to the old
situation which was text only. To enhance it a little bit, I propose to
predefine sections like prerequisite, goal, configuration.
Also these new fields needs to be moved to the xml menu definition so
that we can have the help being external to the board plugin itself.
To be clear, today, I need to code a board plugin to return the help. If
I reuse a plugin for another board, I can't overload the help to better
describe what MY board is about.
By adding it in the myboard.xml.in, I can add help to any board or make
it specific easily. I also have I18N with xmli18n.

I will implement it this way this WE. If somebody whant to keep the
gtkhtml stuff, please tell it now.

Bruno.


le mer 09-01-2002 à 04:17, Christian Rose a écrit :
> 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
> 
> 
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-- 
Bruno Coudoin
ANFORA - http://www.anfora.fr
Tel: (33)5 61 00 34 67