[wp-hackers] Translating 1.5 with Rosetta

[Ryan Boren]

On Wed, 2004-12-22 at 12:24 -0500, Kimmo Suominen wrote:
> What about HTML markup?  I was thinking that at least markup that covers
> the whole phrase should not be included for translation.  Any opinions?

This can be tricky.  We currently don't include markup that spans an
entire translatable string.  We would include the tags in "This string
has a <strong>strong</strong> tag" but not in "<strong>Bold
field:</strong>".  We have to find a balance that allows translators to
control sentence and paragraph structure without having to worry about
breaking UI elements.  This is a much debated subject on other projects;
let's research what they have done.

> There also seem to be numerous ways of saying exactly the same thing:
> sometimes with a "cute" phrase, sometimes in a straight-forward way.
> I find these tough to translate -- wouldn't it be better to just use
> the straight-forward expression always, not the "cute" ones?

We should avoid colloquialisms and consolidate strings that are saying
the same thing.

> I also ran across at least a couple of phrases that had been split
> into 2 strings.  These tend to be impossible to translate properly.

Sentences shouldn't be formed by concatenating strings and paragraphs
shouldn't be formed by concatenating sentences.  We need to fix these.

Ryan