Re: Markup in translatable strings?

[Benno Schulenberg]

Saluton Ludo',

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.

> 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?

> and one doesn’t usually have to
> “close tags” as in XML.)  However, if you think HTML or XML would be
> more appropriate for translators, that’s an option we could consider.

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.

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

Regards,

Benno