proposal: slight change in use of entities

[Jordan Mantha]

On 8/22/06, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
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> Hi,
>
> At the moment, when generating translation templates, and translated
> docbook, we use the "-e" function of xml2po, which basically means that
> the entities we use get expanded into the template, so the translated
> docbook doesn't contain the entities any more, but rather has the entity
> text directly in it.
>
> This causes a slight problem if we want to change something in an
> entity, because it means that the translators have to retranslate the
> string if we just change an entity.

I wondered about that.

> For example, to change the version entity from 6.06 to 6.06.1, we'd have
> to get the translators to re-translate every string where that appears.

Bummer

> We can get around this by changing how we use entities - instead of
> expanding them into the translation template, we can keep them separate.
>
> However, this requires that we don't use any entities that might change
> when translated into a different language. So an entity which reads
> "Ubuntu" would not be satisfactory, because "Ubuntu" gets changed in
> many languages depending on the context (e.g. "in Ubuntu", might require
> a different word to "from Ubuntu").
>
> So I'd propose that what we do is limit the use of entities to version
> numbers and urls, and switch the translation practise as described above.
>
> I don't think too many entities would have to be removed, to be honest.
>
> Do people have any thoughts on this?

Can we put entities that would need translation (like "Ubuntu") at the
beginning of the .xml file? Perhaps we can also have a nice docbook
template that would include common ones. That way we can avoid the
inclusion while still keeping some consistency.

Or perhaps better would be to have a script that would include/update
a common entity section in the .xml files so that we don't have to
maintain many copies of translatable entities.

Or maybe it isn't a big deal and we can just strip the translatable
one out of the .ent files and put them in the .xml directly.

Man, I'm full of answers this evening ;-)

-Jordan