Re: [PATCH v2] i18n: notes: mark comment for translation

From: Vasco Almeida <vascomalmeida@sapo.pt>
Date: Jul 27, 2016, 10:40 UTC
Message-ID: <1469616036.1858.21.camel@sapo.pt>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqvazs1g9o.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

A Ter, 26-07-2016 às 10:05 -0700, Junio C Hamano escreveu:

> In any case, I do not understand why you want to exclude the LFs
> from the message.

As Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason pointed out [1], it is to assure that a translator does not break the output by mistake, by removing a LF. I agree because I have seen a few mistakes about blanks in translations. I do them myself. I think it is easy to do them if you are translating a lot of strings, like if you were to start translating Git to a new language right now. Thus I think it is a good idea to assure that this kind of mistakes do not occur.

Although msgfmt can catch some mistakes, like source string and translation must end both with \n, it does not catch all possible mistakes. For example, I think it does not check a start \n, which is relevant here. For that translator must use other quality assurance tools. I know of translate toolkit [2] and msgcheck [3].

Show 7 quoted lines

> If a translation for a particular language is
> very long and would not fit on a single line, the translator is
> allowed to make the message much longer, i.e. the translated version
> of the <message> part may contain one or more LFs (which is what the
> add-commented-lines function was invented for).  I'd think having
> LFs in the to-be-translated-original will serve as a good hint to
> signal translators that is the case.

When I am translating I always assume that it is fine do add or remove some lines as needed, unless I'm told otherwise (by a comment for translators, e.g.).

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/git@vger.kernel.org/msg98793.html [2] http://docs.translatehouse.org/projects/translate-toolkit/ [3] https://github.com/flashcode/msgcheck