On 1 September 2005 23:36, Ain Vagula wrote: > On 9/1/05, Ivo Hinkelmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi Jonathon, > > > > Jonathon Blake wrote: > > > iv) String context. The English word can be translated two or more > > > ways in the target language. [OOo 1.0.0 through 1.1.4 French has some > > > interesting examples of the English being incorrectly translated.] > > > > This is a common problem in string based translation, any suggestion how > > to solve this ? > > We had a talk with David about this some time ago, I believe he is > working on it. Of course, we could make corrections by hand but this > breaks version management inside translation team. We could make all > strings unique, but this makes translation files huge... I dont wanna > see 500 times in one file strings 'Syntax' and 'Example' :)
I come to think that this "accreting of similars" may be of more harm than help. The absolute overhead is about 4K strings in interface proper. There are 25K strings total (helpcontent not included) and "accreted" POTs Pavel publishes stand at 21K. Straightforwardly, 4K strings is (by my extrapolation) about 8 man-hours of translating work. If it can be organized to flow uninterrupted, of course. And uninterrupted flow suggests context ready at hand. Not searching in helpcontent, not hunting in program sources. (When doing my own translation, I had to resort to all of this, sometimes even to look into German counterparts of English terms :) Then, there are specific-knowledge terms which translator may or may not be familiar with. E. g., financial, statistical and mathematical terms in spreadsheet module, which, obviously, have to be translated *accurately*. And while de-accreting things like ``Syntax'' may be wasteful, there are lots of seemingly "easy" terms which "fork" when translated. And, after all, there are such things as kbabel's rough translation, which can fill in similars automatically and fairly quick, leaving to translator only task of confirmation/unconfirmation. As a side note: Opera folks address problem of having context info by adding extensive comments in their plaintext language file. This is comparatively recent practice but of help nonetheless. -regards --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
