On Wed, 22 Feb 2012, Frédéric Delanoy wrote:
2012/2/22 Lauri Kenttä lauri.kentta@gmail.com:
Hi,
Wine has many texts, especially error messages, that are almost impossible to translate without knowing what they're really about. Some are also easy to misunderstand.
An example from dlls/kernel32/winerror.mc: msgid "Notify change request in progress.\n"
[...]
- What should I do if I wanted to clarify a msgid? Just change the original
.rc file?
Adding a message context. Wine translating page (http://wiki.winehq.org/Translating) has some info on this. Not sure if it applies to winerror messages, though
Wine's winerror messages a pretty terse and usually not full sentences. One thing we noticed recently(*) is that the Windows ones are much longer and form full sentences and as a result are likely less ambiguous. So in the case of the winerror messages the correct fix is probably to simply rewrite the message so it is an unambiguous full sentence.
(*) http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2012-January/093969.html
- Is there a way to add helpful comments to all language files at once
without changing the msgid?
See above
<pedantic-mode>
In theory message contexts are not the right tool to pass commentary about the string to translate either. Normally xgettext takes the comments preceding the string to be translated in a PO file as lines starting with '#. '. But in our case RC files are processed by wrc which I believe does not have a means to access the comments in the RC file. This is why in Wine we normally use message contexts and will likely have to continue doing so. For now it works fine anyway.
In the future we may get into trouble if we start doing that extensively and the same string gets two different 'comments' as this would result in different contexts, hence requiring translators to translate twice. For instance:
"msgctxt#Shown in the File Open dialog#OK" and "msgctxt#Shown in the Print dialog#OK"
-> "OK" needs to be translated twice when that was not the intent
For now we can avoid this by limiting our 'commenting' to the cases that really need it.
</pedantic-mode>
- There has been discussions about some translation websites. Is there a
chance that such a website would allow easy tagging of potential errors?
Problem is attribution of changes to respective authors (+ potential license conflicts). Search the wine-devel archives for more info.
Good starting points: http://wiki.winehq.org/Translating#head-e1a500fef50a1801ecea706ebd9b51457943... and http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2012-February/094302.html