Re: Markup in translatable strings?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Benno Schulenberg <address@hidden> skribis:

> On 2015-07-22 15:55, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-07/msg00471.html
>> 
>> In practice, I imagine we would use at just a few markups, like
>> @code, @itemize and @item, @dfn, @example, and @url.
>> 
>> WDYT?  Is markup acceptable in translatable strings?
>
> You can, but you run the risk that a few translators will mistake
> the @words for translatable words.  Normally msgfmt would verify
> that translators have faithfully copied all formatting specifiers,
> but it doesn't know about a texinfo-format or html-format.
>
> So I would suggest you write a little script that verifies that
> in a PO file any @word in a msgid also occurs in the corresponding
> msgstr.

OK, sounds like a plan.

>> If it is, our preference would be Texinfo, because that’s what is
>> used throughout GNU and Guix; it’s also lightweight (newlines
>> implicitly introduce a new paragraph,
>
> Oof, that sounds a bit "dangerous".  If translators are not aware
> of this, might they mess up the structuring of the text?

Well, this is not different from markup-less text.  What I wanted to say
is that, while HTML has <p> to delimit paragraphs, which can quickly get
verbose, Texinfo has no such thing.

> Most translators would probably recognize <tags> as being tags
> that shouldn't be translated.  But also here it wouldn't hurt to
> have a little script verify the presence of the same tags in both
> msgid and msgstr.  But... when doing such a script anyway, it's
> probably easier to verify Texinfo markup than HTML/XML.  And
> also: Texinfo makes more "sense", HTML is more about appearance.

Yeah, agreed.

We’ll see how we can implement the “switch” to Texinfo.

> So, it's your choice.  Also see the last four paragraphs of
> https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Preparing-Strings.html .

That’s because we had read them that we thought we’d ask your opinion,
especially about Texinfo markup.  :-)

Thank you!

Ludo’.