On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 9:56 PM, Phil Bull <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Kevin, > > On Wed, 2010-08-04 at 18:17 -0500, Kevin Godby wrote: >> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 5:56 PM, Phil Bull <[email protected]> wrote: >> > Sorry to change tack slightly, but I'm wondering whether the format >> > discussion should be deferred until some more important issues are >> > resolved. If we choose an XML format, we can always transform to other >> > formats with a bit of work. >> >> That's true to a degree. But if one format has more granular tags >> than another, it's hard to convert from the more general format to the >> more granular format. (It's easy to swap one tag for another or to >> remove unnecessary tags, but it's hard to add them.) > > That's certainly true in theory, but I don't believe that it's a serious > problem for us in practise. In my experience, few tags are actually > required to give good semantic coverage. Additions to the > frequently-used "core" set of tags tend to cover rare edge cases, where > existing tags could be slightly abused with no ill effect. Often, the > extra tags are displayed in the same way as an existing tag anyway. > > I don't think that there's a significant risk of choosing something > that's semantically too poor. We could even use HTML with different > classes for spans and divs if we wanted to! > >> (Did I stray wildly off-topic and completely forget to answer your question?) > > Eek, yes, although your discussion of translations was definitely > valuable. I still think the editing issue needs to be addressed with > some urgency, though. I'm worried that, after editing has finished, few > messages will have been left intact, and the translators will have to > redo pretty much everything. > > Thanks, > > Phil
The problem here is that Launchpad (rather scandalously unfortunately) does not support the concept of 'fuzzy' strings in gettext. As most of you probably know, if a string is changed only a little, most gettext-related translation software will mark the existing translation as fuzzy, meaning the translators will know to review and adjust the translation. Here is a possible, although not ideal course of action: Make whatever string changes are necessary Export the translation po-files Use msgmerge to get all the fuzzy translations back into the file A reviewer will then have to go through all those changes, then upload to Launchpad. With a bit of scripting and fancy coloured diffs, this could be reasonably efficient. The drawback is that a lot of different people will have to perform this possibly command-line-heavy procedure, so it requires a lot of communication and documentation. But I think this is much better than having translators redo a lot of work. Regards Ask Hjorth Larsen _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-manual Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-manual More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
