i18n issues: Markup in glade labels?

[Christian Stimming]

I'm now starting to review the strings marked for translation (i18n = 
internationalization) in gnucash. During this process I'll point out 
different issues that would require to change the marked strings in the 
gnucash source code.

One issue that I've encountered now is that in HEAD there are many text labels 
in glade files where the label text contains Markup. As in:

#: ../src/business/business-gnome/glade/businessprefs.glade.h:1
msgid "<b>Bills</b>"

which is from the glade file 
src/business/business-gnome/glade/businessprefs.glade. There are 50 other 
such messages. The problem here is that the markup contains no relevant 
information to the translator. And the words in itself (without the markup) 
are also already translated somewhere in the file -- only the fact that here 
it is noted with the HTML markup makes them a second msgid. This is rather a 
nuisance to the translators...

The gnome-i18n guide also recommends not to use such messages with markup [1]. 
Question: Is there any way we could get rid of the markup in the 
to-be-translated part of the message? If there is any way, then I would 
kindly ask to implement it...

Christian



[1] http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html

Section: Avoid markup wherever possible

(...) In this type of messages, the markup contains no relevant information to 
the translator, since all the translatable content is embedded in the markup 
(in the last example above, the message could just as well have been split 
into two separate messages, so this still applies). Instead, these messages 
are just an extra source for errors (when the markup gets accidentally 
"mistranslated"), a nuisance, and create lots of extra and totally 
unnecessary work for the translators. Whenever the markup for a message 
should change the slightest, all translations will have to be updated, even 
though no translatable content changed. Whenever a new message is added that 
has surrounding markup, even if the exact same message without this exact 
markup was translated before, the message will have to be "translated" again.