[Fwd: Suggested improvement in GNUN: split very long messages]

[Therese Godefroy]

Hello

Ineiev just suggested that I move to trans-coord-devel to discuss this
matter.

Therese

-------- Message transféré --------
De: Therese Godefroy <address@hidden>
À: trans-coord-discuss <address@hidden>
Sujet: Suggested improvement in GNUN: split very long messages
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2012 11:11:20 +0200

Hello everyone,

"Translatable strings should be limited to one paragraph; don't let a
single message be longer than ten lines." (quote from the gettext
manual)
That pretty well summarizes what I am getting at.

The problem is that some of the GNU articles have very long paragraphs,
much longer than 10 lines. Here is a (truncated) example from
eldred-amicus.pot, which I chose because this text probably cannot be
edited -- some transcriptions are a lot worse.

#. type: Content of: <p>
msgid ""
"The First Amendment abhors the vacuum of limited expression.  The
making of "
"new works by the criticism, imitation, revision, and rearrangement of "
"existing material is the hallmark of literate culture in all the arts
and "
"sciences.  The First Amendment establishes not merely a series of "
"independent doctrines, but a &ldquo;system of free expression.&rdquo; "
[...]
(The whole message is in the attachment.)

I find those very long messages very hard to proofread or translate,
especially when they have repeating patterns. It's very easy to skip a
phrase or sentence.


One way to make translators' life easier would be to split the long
messages with a bogus tag such as <split> which would be recognized by
GNUN but overlooked by browsers. Of course, the tag would have to be
inserted after a complete sentence. Doing this automatically with the
above text would be impossible, so I suppose it could only be done by
hand with new articles and with a few old ones. Also, the translator
would have to leave at least one space at the end of intermediate
messages.

The attachment gives an example of what I have in mind.

I discussed that with Denis and he pointed out that the <split> tag
would make the HTML non-compliant with W3C standards. He suggested
creating another HTML-like file which would contain the <split> tags and
would serve as starting point for both the true HTML (by removing the
tags) and the POT.


Comments from the GNUN gurus would be highly appreciated.  :-)

Best regards,
Therese

message-splitting-example.txt.tar.gz
Description: application/compressed-tar