Mailing List Archive

Reducing similar or duplicated strings
Hi everyone,

I'd appreciate help from translators in spotting where we can make
improvements by removing multiple strings which say the same or very similar
things.

This may be subtle and irrelevant changes in case:

"Program guide" vs "Program Guide"

Or due to punctuation:

"Press any key to finish" vs "Press any key to finish!"

Or different working with the exact same meaning:

"Press play to watch the video" vs "To watch the video, press play"

Obviously context is important and just because strings seem similar, it
doesn't mean they can all be removed. Strings coming from themestrings.h may
vary because of a conscious decision by the themer.

Other things to watch for are multiple strings for plurals:

"There is %1 recording"
"There are %2 recordings"

or

"%1 item"
"%1 items"

These should be handled in a special way, so please let me know if you see any
of these.

Fixing these won't make a serious impact on the number of strings that you
need to translate, but it will help.
--
Stuart Morgan
Reducing similar or duplicated strings [ In reply to ]
Hi Stuart!

On 8/18/2010 4:22 PM, Stuart Morgan wrote:
> I'd appreciate help from translators in spotting where we can make
> improvements by removing multiple strings which say the same or very similar
> things.

The strings in question must be in the same "context" though, right?

(Meaning you won't change lookups in the code simply to diminish the
number of "duplicate" strings?)

I'm saying this from memory since I haven't had the chance to work on
the translations (French and en_us) in weeks but I believe by far the
source of "duplicate" strings are the themes (and like you said in this
case this was probably done on purpose by the "themer").

I'll (I hope) complete the cleanup work I had begun on the en_us
translation this week-end or the next. The fact that somebody else
submitted a patch that was commited while I had unsubmitted stuff on my
side is making this somewhat of a PITA but on the bright side this will
force me to check all of the current source strings and not simply what
I'll be adding so I'll take notes and let you know if I find anything.

(I did not simply copy the source strings into the translated strings
when I worked on the en_us translation a few months ago, I also checked
for problems too (like the original text being in British English for
example) and I wasn't able to do that for the update that was submitted
by somebody else...)

Nobody was interested to work on en_us and now that I have unsubmitted
stuff somebody else submits updates, go figure... I wish the person in
question would have contacted me beforehand before he started working on
that update...

But, like I said, on the bright side this will force me to look at all
the strings so if I spot anything I'll let you know...

There is one place where we had some problems translating the original
text because two English words had similar enough meaning that we
translated them in the same way. I think it was in Terra and the
sentences we had to translate were "Watch Recordings" and "Play
Recordings" I believe. It is possible in French to find two different
words for this but because of space constraints we translated them
exactly the same way... As expected it kinda look funny since one was
the name of the menu entry and the other its description and they were
identical...

Oops, I better go if I want to eat my dessert before it's too late...

Have a nice day!

Nick