A few questions about UI strings

Frederik Schwarzer schwarzerf at gmail.com
Mon Apr 13 10:21:48 UTC 2009


On Monday 13 April 2009 09:44:51 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> On 12.04.09 22:38:31, Frederik Schwarzer wrote:
> > On Sunday 12 April 2009 02:03:52 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> > > On 11.04.09 18:57:05, Frederik Schwarzer wrote:
> > > > ====
> > > > kdevelop/languages/cpp/veritas/uutcontextaction.cpp
> > > > "Generate Unit Under Test"
> > > > 
> > > > Another candidate for some context
> > > 
> > > Hmm, why? Though, again I'd say only the first word needs translation.
> > > The rest is a standard term within the area of unit-testing :) Should we
> > > change such things to
> > > i18n("Generate")+" Unit Under Test", or rather use
> > 
> > No. For German it is common to leave such terms but there are countries
> > that are more ... proud of their language or languages with different
> > writings (e.g. Japanese uses Hiragana and Katakana signs to transcribe english
> > words. And even in German there might be a proper german term in the future, like
> > "Entwurfsmuster" for "Design Pattern".
> > Every user-visible string has to be translatable, even if it seems reasonable to
> > not translate it.
> 
> :( Thats one of the reasons I don't use the german translation for
> kdevelop since 5 years. Its completely non-understandable for somebody
> who knows its way around these things as they try to translate each and
> everything.

Well, that depends. :D
The former maintainer tried to not translate everything, but there are sometimes
translators that are not familiar with this kind of stuff at all (like the last
one) and translate almost everything word after word.
I look over KDevelop now and I do not try to translate everything either.
E.g. Switch-Case, push/pull, commit ... stay as they are because every atempt to
translate these fails horribly. Function, class, namespace, scope and such have
very common German translations (Funktion, Klasse, Namensraum,
Gültigkeitsbereich).
However, I think apps like KDevelop are not translated for developers that are
more or less fluent in English but to those who aren't.
If I am ready with KDevelop & Co. you could try it anyway and make suggenstions,
if you like. I hope I can win the fight against this l10n monster using my
(though limited) knowledge about the topics. :)


> However, I think some of these texts cannot be reasonably translated by
> somebody who has no idea about developing. For example I can't think of
> a good context for the above right now as (without repeating the
> sentence) it seems really obvious what is meant there.

Sure. Translation context is not meant to explain what a class is or how
unit tests work. In this specific exampe (Unit Under Test) I didn't see that
"unit under test" is an established term. In that case it is not reasonable
to explain what it is.


> Changed the text. But didn't know how to add context to a .ui file, how
> is this done?

Use the comment="" attribute ind the string tag, e.g.:
<string comment="Description" >Foo</string>

Regards




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