Re: [Plone-i18n] Plone's gettext approach and its impact on translation

[Hanno S. <ha...@ha...>]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 11:10 AM, Maurits van Rees
<m.v...@ze...> wrote:
> I am under the impression, that using msgids is preferable to using the
> source text directly, at least when this source text is a bit long.
> That way, a restructuring of the original text, or simply fixing a typo,
> does not lead to fuzzy translations.

This specific problem is one of the two reasons we adopted for our
msgid approach. It solves a problem you get if you don't use any
sophisticated tools for doing translations, like it is the case for
most developers.

But it actually does hurt all translators using real tools, which have
translation memories to solve this. If you have a translation memory,
that's the place where you keep the old translation. If you give a
translator any new or changed string, they'll ask their translation
memory to pull out any fuzzy matches from it and then adjust any
mismatching bits. These translation memories assume that the msgid is
the real text and do the matching based on it.

I think we should change the approach to maybe preserve the old text
in an extra comment, so developers using no tools still see it, but we
don't confuse the real tools.

Hanno