On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 03:01:36AM +0100, Benedict wrote:
Imagine a template file changes in the ./default/en/ directory and the
author ignores informing about it the rest of the community. Now,
everybody (of the international community) is to figure out what changes
took place and when they took place, and he is to manually find the
lines to be translated and modified.
In another project of mine, the more common problem was that
someone would add an English string, but it would take a long time for
it to be translated, especially into some of the less "popular"
languages, like Portuguese.
One of the advantages of gettext() is that if this happens,
the new string will appear in English in all versions, until someone
gets around to translating it.
In addition, separating all content from translatable strings
follows the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle advocated by "The
Pragmatic Programmer."
It's fair to say that I got pretty bored of translating "Logged in as"
over and over again. And then I should add that it's all getting very
complicated when you don't have just one but 3 or 4 translators : for
the french translation we each took a few directories, but didn't have
any garantee to end up with a coherent translation. And after a few
days, we realized we had used 3 different translations for the quite
straightforward "e-mail"...