2007/9/4, Francesc Hervada-Sala <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Hi all,
Hello Francesc, > It seems to me that it is a common practice to use HTML character entitites > for all special characters in translated messages. On the other hand the > translation guidelines say that one should avoid using HTML character > entities: > > With a few exceptions (noted below), all translations should be written > literally, rather than escaping accented and special characters with HTML > character entities. > Source: > http://codex.wordpress.org/Translating_WordPress#Guidelines_and_requirements > > I try to sum up: > > > .mo files without HTML entities do not work for blogs using other character > encodings than UTF-8 (the later being the default and recommended in WP). > .mo files with HTML entities do not work for e-mail messages sent by > wordpress. > .po files with HTML entites are less translator-friendly and thus more > error-prone. > As Kim Suominen pointed out on March 7th, 2005, the best solution would be > the WP core to translate UTF-8 into the blog's character encoding on runtime > (both when generating html and e-mails). See > http://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-polyglots/2005-March/000449.html > > At the translation files I've worked on (catalan for WP 2.2, 2.2.1 and > 2.2.2) I've followed this approach: > > > translated strings in .po files contain no HTML character entities (original > strings are obviously left with entities untouched) > a Perl script I wrote generates an equivalent .po file with HTML character > entities in translated strings > there are 2 deployed versions of the WP catalan translation: the "normal > version" (just for UTF-8 blogs, works fine with e-mail), the "html version" > (works with all blog character encodings, produces "ugly" error messages) > Do you think this approach could be generalised for all WP localizations? > > By the way I think the common practice today does not meet the guidelines - > we should change one of both to let them accord. Does anybody these days really need encoding different than utf-8? If one really does, converting the po file and recompiling the mo seems the best solution. Converting the utf-8 characters to entities is a big overhead -- either for the translator or the man who prepares the pot file. Also it comes with about 3 times strings size. Anyway, if you really need to use other encodings, you can do it on the fly with Kimmo's plugin: http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/charsets/ Happy translating, Nikolay. _______________________________________________ wp-polyglots mailing list [email protected] http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-polyglots
