Translation problems

[Reinke Bonte]

> El mar, 21 de 10 de 2003 a las 22:49, A. Alper ATICI escribi__:
> > I have to barge in, since I too suffer from this issue.
> > Some strings are used in many different contexts, this makes
> > translation to non-Germanic languages very difficult. 
> > I think Reinke has a good point, fallback to "C" locale should be 
> > eliminated, but:
> > > The programmer should write _("New Account"), _("New Loan") or
> > > _("New Invoice") in the source code. 
> > I think this puts some unfair burden on the developer. 
> > Context difference is the problem of translators, and they should
> > guide the developer via reference comments in PO file.
> > How about mangling msgid's? i.e. "New", "New at 001#", "New at 002#"... 
> > This way, there will always be a "New" as before, and en_US.po will 
> > contain:
> 
> 	I think that it would be better to have more meaningfull msgids.
> "New at Profile#", "New at Account#", etc. seem more reasonable to me. :)
> 

I thought it is common practice that the "C" locale is still readable.

I cannot understand what problem my suggested names would cause.
However, I do understand Derek's caveat that thanks to reuse of code
there might not be many places where "New" uniquely means "New Loan" or
"New Account" respectively.

Most standard menus consist of single words, and that is a good thing,
because it's slick. But I think there should be an awareness among the
developers, that single words are difficult if not sometimes impossible
to translate. 

I remember a project where they had a single "of" in the message
catalog, which was used in every imaginable context. Reuse is not always
a good thing.


Reinke