Mattias Engdegård wrote on Wed, 07 Mar 2018 16:35 +0100: > The gettext manual recommends: > > Translatable strings should be limited to one paragraph; don’t let a single > message be longer than ten lines. The reason is that when the translatable > string changes, the translator is faced with the task of updating the entire > translated string. Maybe only a single word will have changed in the English > string, but the translator doesn’t see that (with the current translation > tools), therefore she has to proofread the entire message.
There is no reason the translator should have to re-read the entire message. If a translator translated rN fully and now HEAD == rM, the translator should run 'diff -r N:M' to see how the message changed. That's the basic idea. A more elaborate idea would be: 1. Extract English strings from rN 2. Extract English strings from rM 3. Display a wdiff3 of (old = rN, theirs = rM, mine = the po file). .... as I described last year: https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/subversion-dev/201702.mbox/%3C20170205204820.GA6737%40fujitsu.shahaf.local2%3E I think the above workflow makes a lot more sense than paragraph-wise translations. Cheers, Daniel P.S. I'm genuinely curious to know why the gettext manual doesn't recommend this approach already. Version control predates gettext, doesn't it?