[kde-doc-english] Entities in Kleopatra

[Lauri Watts]

On Wednesday 04 August 2004 16.26, Erik K. Pedersen wrote:
> Onsdag 04 august 2004 13:22 skrev Éric Bischoff:
> > Kleopatra's DOCTYPE block lists a lot of general entites definitions, for
> > example menu entries :
> >
> >  <!ENTITY file-new-key-pair
> > "<menuchoice><guimenu>File</guimenu><guimenuitem>New Key
> > Pair...</guimenuitem></menuchoice>">
> >
> > There is nothing wrong with that (instead, it's a good idea, as it spares
> > copie'n'pastes and is cleaner), but xml2po and po2xml don"t look into the
> > DOCTYPE block. Therefore the corresponding texts cannot be translated
> > with po files.
>
> I think it is a rather awful idea as far as translation is concerned.
> Entities often can not be used because the structure of other languages is
> different.

Entities for these are a real problem, I don't know how to solve it.  Writing 
the damn menu entries out is also no piece of cake, so I completely see why 
Marc did this.  I've toyed with this many times, and the nearest to a 
solution I can see doing some &file.new; type thing in user.entities, where 
each language can translate them as they please.  Note, you are not bound to 
use the same entities in any other language as we do in English - if there's 
four ways to say "New", have four entities for it in your own language 
user.entities, and use the appropriate one in the translation.   
user.entities is entirely your own playground, and you can do anything you 
like in it, so long as it's valid, and semantically correct.

> I have another question: in some docs they use &kappname; instead of the
> programs actual name. That would help enormously with translation since
> there would be very many strings in the database that way. Would that be
> difficult to have more generally

Well, the reason we never use &kappname, is because translators said it was 
confusing to them, when looking at strings, it's easy to get confused what 
app it is (and to get the grammar wrong for languages where it may matter.)  
I've had this comment several times, so apparently this is a concern to some 
translators.

So, currently those apps using &kappname; in their docs are considered a bug, 
and there are harsh admonitions in the markup guide and the template against 
doing this, and Phil and I have spent not inconsiderable amounts of time 
teaching everyone   Any that you see currently doing this have slipped 
through, and if we'd noticed them, we'd have fixed those too.

I suggest you guys discuss this  on kde-i18n-doc@ and when you have a 
concensus, and tell us what you want, so we can adapt the usage, the 
guidelines, and the doc template to that.  I'm not too bothered either way - 
the only reason we don't use kappname already, is to (we thought) please 
i18n :)

Regards,
-- 
Lauri Watts
KDE Documentation: http://docs.kde.org
KDE on FreeBSD: http://freebsd.kde.org
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