Re: [Audacity-devel] P3 bug changing language in Preferences

[Richard A. <ri...@au...>]

On Sat, 2009-12-19 at 23:07 -0800, Ed Musgrove wrote:
> BTW, my Spanish is rudimentary at best but I note significant differences in
> the CONTENT of fr.po and es.po. The es.po is lacking 398 strings which the
> fr.po has.
> 
> I also note that both have 
> #~ msgid ""
> (22 in French 1 in Spanish)
> 
> and the string
> "\n"
> is TRANSLATED 67 times in fr.po and 68 times in es.po. It need not be
> translated but should occur equally in both files.

You need a bit more background on how the translations system works.

1) The source code for Audacity is processed with the xgettext utility
to create the audacity.pot file. This contains all the translatable
strings from the source code.
2) The relevant language's .po file is updated from the audacity.pot
file (manually) to add the new translatable strings (which won't be
translated at this point). This is done with msgmerge
3) The translator goes through the .po file and translates the
untranslated strings (e.g. with poedit).
4) The completed .po file is compiled (with msgfmt) into the .mo file
which is then loaded by Audacity at run-time and used to display the
translated strings.

So one reason why the .po files have different strings is because one or
both of the translators haven't updated their .po files from the latest
audacity.pot file. I suggest you update both .po files and see what
differences remain.

Richard