Re: Installer branding
On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 04:03:35PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
[...]
> changes differently. This means that I ended up making changes like:
>
> "Insert a Debian CD-ROM"
> "Insert an Ubuntu CD-ROM"
>
> "Serwer lustrzany z archiwum Debiana:"
> "Serwer lustrzany z archiwum Ubuntu:"
>
> "לא יכול להתקין את דביאן"
> "לא יכול להתקין את אובונטו"
[...]
> So, it would be really nice if we could make the whole translation
> branding thing less of a problem. One easy approach is to observe that
> not all those strings really need to mention Debian in the first place.
> In a number of places, they could be replaced by "the system" or "the
> installer" or whatever without losing any information: users already
> have a pretty good idea they're installing Debian because they got this
> CD with "Debian" printed on it, or they downloaded it from a Debian FTP
> site.
That would be a possible approach, but it could mean you get awkward
sentences if you're not careful; and if you are careful and err on the
safe side, you might end up with a situation that isn't far from what
you have now, making the whole effort moot. I'm afraid that approach
isn't going to work.
> Another approach is to try to avoid mentioning the distribution name in
> the middle of sentences so that it doesn't have to appear in translated
> strings at all.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean; however, in the general case,
it is not a good idea to depend on the position of a word in one
language to make translations less of a problem, as that simply will not
work. See the ngettext() documentation for an extensive discussion of
that case. I'm quite sure that approach isn't going to work either.
How about using a preprocessor on the .po files? I'm thinking of having
msgstr's like this:
msgstr "Insert ADEBIAN CDROM"
which would be run through some sort of preprocessor, that would create
a file with things like
msgstr "Insert a Debian CDROM"
for Debian, or (with some reconfiguration)
msgstr "Insert an Ubuntu CDROM"
for Ubuntu. It would require having an en.po to function properly, but
that shouldn't be a problem; and this would move the problem to having
correct .po files. This would need some coordination with the different
translators, but I do think it could be done.
--
The amount of time between slipping on the peel and landing on the
pavement is precisely one bananosecond
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