[wp-hackers] Translating 1.5 with Rosetta

[Ryan Boren]

On Wed, 2004-12-22 at 12:31 +0100, Albert Holm wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 03:15:23 -0800, Matthew Mullenweg <m at mullenweg.com>  
> wrote:
> 
> > Luca Lizzeri wrote:
> >> Also, many strings are present both with and without punctuation: Now
> >> I am seeing both "Search" and "Search:". It would be easier if
> >> end-of-phrase punctuation was kept outside the translatable strings
> >
> > Been trying to clean this up when I see it.
> >
> 
> How would removing this work with right-to-left languages?
> I imagine translating the : would make it easier, but maybe then the label  
> should be on the right side of the textbox also.
> [input]:Search but with the : moved out, it would be [input]Search: or  
> something similar.

Right.  End punctuation should be marked for translation too.  If you're
not using iso-8859-1, a colon is probably meaningless.  Some non-
European languages include a few Romanized punctuation marks, but we
shouldn't assume such.  Further, when Romanized punctuation marks are
used in right-to-left languages, they are a mirror image of their
iso-8859-1 counterparts.  Also, some languages don't use colons to end a
declarative introduction. 

To address the problem, we need to consistently label fields either with
or without a colon in the source.  If we use colons, they should always
be marked for translation.  Look at other po files on Rosetta.  The
colon is always marked for translation.  All punctuation should be
included so that the translation teams can make the decision that is
correct for their locale.  Don't try to guess at what they need to have
marked up.  The general rule is: include everything.

Ryan