On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 9:30 PM, Hakan Tandogan
<address@hidden> wrote:
As we all are aware, gettext and its implementations in python use the source string (english) as a key for the translated string (msgid).
One little downside I observed with transifex is that it removes all translations for which there are no source text (anymore). Meaning, if we have a large block of text in maposmatic/about.html or maposmatic/donate.html, even little changes in the source cause the translation at transifex to vanish.
It does not vanish, it is saved in the Transifex translation memory, and translators can access it from there with the suggestions feature in the Transifex UI, I used it yesterday for the two translations I made.
This in turn feels for the translators like we lost their hard work on translating the huge paragraphs.
One solution that comes to mind would be to split those big blocks into sentence-sized translation units.
Doing this could be useful even though Transifex has a the translation memory feature, as shorter texts will always be easier to handle for the translator.
At the same time, we could move hard-codable strings like git URLs to some other configuration location, like it is done with the {{about_url}} in donate.html, line 43.
Is this acceptable for you?
Which one, split messages or move them? I don't think you should move things out of the regular "translation system".
--
Guttorm