Translations are broken in KF5 apps

[Alexander Potashev]

Hi KDE Frameworks devs,

I tried to run a couple of KF5-based KDE applications, namely Kate and
Konsole (Russian and Ukrainian) and localization there looks very
poor, even though from the translators' side the localization packages
are complete or almost complete.

One of the bugs that has been more or less tracked down is related to
adding accelerators (&) at run-time. It has been discovered by
Burkhard Lueck a few weeks ago (May 14-15). What a non-English user
can see is, many menu items still appear in English while they have
translations in *.mo files installed in
/usr/share/locate/**/LC_MESSAGES. We could guess that translation of a
menu item breaks when an accelerator is added at run-time (Burkhard
said "drclash adds/rearranges the & at runtime"). Because in a .mo
there are only translations for strings without accelerators, a
i18n(...) call applied to a &-enabled string will fail to find its
translation in the .mo.

Codewise accelerator rearrangements seem to be done in
kxmlgui/src/kcheckaccelerators.cpp and
kwidgetsaddons/src/kacceleratormanager.cpp. I guess these are good
places to start further investigation.

Names and descriptions from .desktop files are not translated in many
places. For example in System Settings for module names and
descriptions, application names in Kickoff and plasmoid names in both
widgets explorer and their settings dialogs. Wallpaper types in
Desktop settings are translated even though they seem to come from
.desktop files.

Qt 5 translations are not being loaded. This is the most likely reason
why we don't see translated buttons "OK" / "Cancel" / "Apply" in
various dialogs.

There is some evidence that .qm translation files from Tier 1
frameworks are still commonly not loaded properly: if you open Dolphin
and look under the "Devices" label in the "Places" dock, you will see
untranslated strings like "200,0 GiB Hard Drive" which I expect to
come from the Solid framework and to be translated in solid5_qt.qm.
May be the file naming is wrong?

A fresh build of translation files for Russian and Ukrainian can be
found here: https://github.com/aspotashev/l10n-kf5-built


Thanks to Lasse Liehu for parts of this e-mail completely written by
him and for assistance with the other text!

-- 
Alexander Potashev