Re: [Tuxpaint-i18n] msgctxt (was: Dutch translation (missing))

[Leandro R. <lea...@gm...>]

On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 11:11 AM, F Wolff <fr...@tr...> wrote:
> Op Vr, 2010-05-21 om 13:27 +0200 skryf Leandro Regueiro:
>> > What's msgctxt?  (A Google search for the phrase is useless to one
>> who
>> > doesn't know what it is already, it seems ;) )
>>
>> http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/gettext/Contexts.html
>>
>> msgctxt is a tag in PO files (like msgid and msgstr ones) that allow
>> to put a context or comment that helps the translators. I know that
>> you already can put comments like comments begining with  # character,
>> but msgctxt is only used for that. In some translation projects they
>> made an extensive use of this PO tag.
>
> Although the name might suggest it, the primary purpose of msgctxt is
> not to provide context.  The comments work fine for doing that.  The
> primary purpose of msgctxt is to disambiguate otherwise identical
> messages.  If you want to translate "View" differently as a verb and as
> a noun, there is no way to do it in the "old" gettext way, as there is
> only one such string in the file.  By adding the extra parameter to the
> "pgettext" type calls, you can allow translators to translate an
> identical string in different ways, for example to translate "view" as a
> noun and as a verb for the particular context.  So msgctxt isn't really
> to provide context information, but to allow for the same string in
> different contexts to be translated differently.
>
> Very subtle, but important difference, in my nit-picking opinion :-)

So they are different parts of speech. For me this is context information.

Also, some developers used to put the context in translator comment
fields, so using a tag like this one leads to less problems IMHO.