[Etoys] Issues concerning translation

[Markus Schlager]

Hi Severin,

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009, Séverin Lemaignan wrote:
[...]
>
> Then, I've some trouble with certain strings, used both in the viewer
> categories and in another place. For instance, the string "restore
> base graphic" is present in the viewer category Graphics and in the
> object context menu. I would like to translate it differently in both
> case (for instance, capitalization and infinitive in the menu
> (->"Rétablir l'apparence initiale"), and third person of simple
> present in the viewer ("Sketch. reprend l'apparence initiale").
> Another annoying case: top, bottom, left, right. When I want my user
> to choose a position for a flap for instance, I need to translated it
> "En haut / en bas / à gauche / à droite". In the category "Geometry",
> it's simply "haut, bas, gauche, droite".

This is a problem we encountered with the German translation as well. For 
example we'd like to translate strings differently in etoys-tiles and 
menu-entries. Actually this is a serious issue when using etoys at 
school.

There has been some discussion on this topic on the localization-list last 
year. A solution would be to provide some information about "context" of a 
string to be translated. This is a feature gettext and pootle are capable 
of. It also would help to make strings unique in pootle which would it 
make possible finally to use 'suggestions' on pootle, which doesn't work 
on pootle for etoys and scratch at the moment.

To make all this happen there's need for a discussion on what meaningful 
"context" might be.

>From my point of view as a translator I'd suggest contexts like 
'script-tile', 'menu-entry', 'balloon-help' as a rather simple concept. 
Another choice might be the message-selector, i.e something like 
'class>>selector'.

Strings this is really an issue for are short ones (three words or 
less) like 'open' which in German can be translated as 'offen', 'öffnen', 
'öffne', depending on context even as 'öffnet'.

Markus
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  Markus Schlager                  m.slg at gmx.de