Re: Document translations broken in Texinfo 7.0.90?

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 08:34:51PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > That could be a transitory measure to wait for translations to be
> > updated.  We could do that in particular if we notice that many
> > translations are not updated for the official release.
> 
> This does not even work.  I tried it with the latest de.po in the
> "texinfo_document" domain.  The de.po file has a line:
> 
> #: tp/Texinfo/Convert/HTML.pm:738 tp/Texinfo/Convert/HTML.pm:742
> #: tp/Texinfo/Convert/HTML.pm:794
> msgid "Next"
> msgstr "Nächste"
> 
> which gives the translation of "Next" (without a context), but when
> I run "make update-po" this line goes away, and we have lines like
> the following instead:
> 
> #: tp/Texinfo/Convert/HTML.pm:2143
> #, fuzzy
> #| msgid "Next"
> msgctxt "NodeNext direction string"
> msgid "Next"
> msgstr "Nächste"
> 
> I only got this translation to be used by removing the "#, fuzzy" line.

All that looks good and expected to me.  The advantage of fuzzy strings,
for a translator, is that a fuzzy entry can be more rapidly processed as
it is more likely to be a correct translation.

> Also under (gettext)msgcmp Invocation:
> 
>   ‘--use-fuzzy’
>        Consider fuzzy messages in the DEF.po file like translated
>        messages.  Note that using this option is usually wrong, because
>        fuzzy messages are exactly those which have not been validated by a
>        human translator.
> 
> I expect there is a solution to be found here, either by doing something
> to change the operation of "make update-po" or other Makefile rules for
> gettext, or otherwise stripping out some of the "#, fuzzy" lines from the
> *.po files.  I expect I'll be looking into this in the coming days, as it's
> quite important to have a fix (even a short-term one) before the official
> release.

That could be good, but beware that in some cases, the fuzzy
translations can be wrong.  In general, when a context is added, the
fuzzy translation is to be expected to be correct (even though it could
potentially be improved with context), but if there was at the same time
other changes in other strings, the fuzzy translations could be wrong.

> You can see the progress of translation at
> 
> https://translationproject.org/domain/texinfo_document.html
> 
> and although many translations are updated completely, for those that
> haven't been it is quite a severe drop in the number of translated strings,
> from 195/195 to 138/208 (that's about 30%).

I think that we should distinguish translations that are still
maintained, ie that had a drop in translated strings in 7.0.92 only and
translations that had a drop for previous releases too, and that are
probably not really maintained anymore.  For translations that had a
drop in translated strings in 7.0.92 only, I think that we could wait a
bit to have more for the release.  For the other translations, to me the
right thing to do would be to find new maintainers, having a drop in
translated strings is problematic, but should be fixed by having new
maintainers, not otherwise, in my opinion.

-- 
Pat