Re: Make lang.po override translations?

[Ineiev]

Hello, Dora;

On Fri, Apr 15, 2022 at 09:05:55PM +0200, Dora Scilipoti wrote:
> 
> if I understood correctly, the per-directory template
> /proprietary/po/lang.po does not override the existing translations.

Yes, this is correct. the up-to-date translations from articles
are used to update $lang.po, and $lang.po is used to fill missing
translations from articles.

> Overriding would be useful in cases where the translator wants to
> introduce improvements or fix translation mistakes in items that belong
> to several files.
> 
> Would it be possible?

If $lang.po overrode up-to-date translations from articles, it would
mean one of the following:

* When an article needs a specific translation for the same string
  (different from translations for other articles), that string
  can't have a translation in $lang.po, moreover, translations
  from articles can't be used to automatically fill $lang.po
  (because $lang.po in its turn is used to update other articles).

  I think these possibilities are essential for the feature to be
  practically useful.

* All strings have to be translated in the same way; I believe
  this would be an unacceptable limitation.

* Some way to introduce "strong" translations is needed, e.g. via
  magic comments in PO or additional PO files, as you suggested.

  If such a way were added, it would mean increased requirements
  on the hardware running GNUN, and the sysadmins recently had to
  substantially reduce per-user resource limits on fencepost,
  probably due to high load.  More important, the increased
  complexity would negatively impact GNUN usability.

When translators want to fix a translation in many articles,
they can fix it in $lang.po and use gettext tools to remove the
wrong translations from other files.

For instance, let's imagine that we'd like to fix translations
for the (English) strings starting with 'Honeywell/Resideo';
the regular expression looks like '^Honeywell/Resideo'.
after fixing $lang.po, we'll use msggrep to filter the messages
in *.$lang.po.

First, let us check if the expression only matches the strings
we want:

lang=es
touch sum.$lang.po
for po in *.$lang.po; do
  msggrep --msgid -E -e '^Honeywell/Resideo' $po \
  | msgcat -o sum.$lang.po --use-first --unique sum.$lang.po -;
done
cat sum.$lang.po; rm sum.$lang.po

If the expression selects the correct set of messages, we
could use it to remove them:

for po in *.$lang.po; do
  msggrep -v --msgid -E -e '^Honeywell/Resideo' $po > tmp.po;
  mv tmp.po $po;
done

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