So good to see that everyone is positive about this :)
Here is a summary of what goes wrong when trying to check the Persian
translation using common filters.

* acronyms: We translate most of the acronyms into Persian, e.g. CD or
URL. The test fails.

* brackets: It works well with paranthesis. When it comes to square
brackets, it fails since in the right-to-left languages (including
Persian) ] stands for opening brackets and comes before [.

* doublequoting & singlequoting: The characters used for them in Persian
are « and ». So the test fails whenever the message contains quotation
marks.

* escapes: causes problems when there is \" in the string because of the
above problem.

* doublewords: The test should check for double words in the original
message and should not alert when it contains double words as well.
There are messages such as "Dot Dot Dash" among OO.o strings.

* endpunc, startpunc, purepunc & puncspacing: Persian doesn't use
English punctuation marks. The test fails when we use ؟ for ? and ٪ for
%. Comma and Semicolon changes to ، and ؛ in Persian (as well as other
right-to-left scripts) so the test fails when the string contains any
punctuation marks except the period.
Another problem is that the translated string doesn't necessarily keep
the word order. For example, there is a string "Automatic *bold* and
_underline_". The word-by-word Persian translation would be "*bold* and
_underline_ automatic". Both startpunc and endpunc are violated.

* numbers: Persian doesn't use European digits for numbers. The test is
of no use with Persian digits (Extended Arabic-Indic digits).

* sentencecount: it misunderstands floating points with full stops.
Persian uses a different character for decimal separator (U+066B). The
dot abbreviations also cause problems in counting sentences.

* simplecaps & startcaps: Might not be useful even for Latin scripts,
since the capitalization pattern could be different from English. Not
good for other scripts.

Disabling all these filters is almost equal to not using pofilter at
all. In fact msgfmt just checks the syntactical correctness of the file.
It doesn't do anything more than what pofilter does; but the number of
false positive results of poilter is what pushes our translators away.

Cheers,
fa



On دوشنبه, 2006-01-09 at 08:43 +0700, Javier SOLA wrote:
> Hi Frazaneh,
> 
> In order to improve the translate toolkit, and make it  at  least as 
> usefull for testing as gettext, what do you think should be added to 
> pofilter?
> 
> Javier
> 
> Farzaneh Sarafraz wrote:
> 
> >What Ain has said neatly fixes everything, but a problem rises for GNU
> >gettext users:
> >The resulting po files are buggy in their headers. The headers are
> >marked fuzzy and the header fields are set to default values.
> >This is OK as far as translate-toolkit and sdf files are concerned, but
> >it causes GNU gettext tools such as msgfmt report fatal errors.
> >Our translators use GNU gettext to test their work since pofilter is
> >extremely incompetent in checking the correctness of the translations.
> >I would love to hear your views and ideas on this.
> >fa
> >

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