[Po4a-devel][CVS] po4a/lib/Locale/Po4a Xml.pm,NONE,1.1

[Jordi Vilalta]

On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Denis Barbier wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 11:22:56AM +0200, Jordi Vilalta wrote:
> > On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Michael Wiedmann wrote:
> [...]
> > > Further in DocBook there should  _not_ be any translatable text in attributes.
> > > Of course there could be DTDs with text in attributes so it would be good if
> > > this will be supported.
> > 
> > Sorry, I meant only the attribute's value: "en". This is a necessary 
> > transformation for translated documents. I think that putting it as a 
> > string to translate is the easiest way to achieve it.
> 
> This would require a comment being added to PO files to let translators
> know how to deal with this msgid, and my experience is that translators
> hardly read such comments, because they use tools which do not display
> them (kbabel, gtranslator, poedit, etc, very few of them handle comments
> in a useful way).

I've been using poedit and it shows them well. But I agree with you on the 
translators behavior about the comments.

> This attribute may be automagically added, e.g. including translations
> from xx.po could set lang="xx".

With this you're forcing the name of the po file, not much interesting in 
some cases. And there's also another issue: there can be a language 
without the translated DocBook templates, and they may want to set the 
lang attribute to any arbitrary language. There's also the possibility to 
have more than one lang attribute (with different values) around the 
document.

I think that another solution would be to create artificial msgids:
"TRANSLATE ONLY AFTER THE ':'\n
THIS IS THE VALUE OF THE aaa ATTRIBUTE OF THE ttt TAG: en"

Maybe this isn't very friendly to pure translators, but I think that 
software translators should have a minimal idea about the format they're 
translating (see the 'E<lt>' stuff in the extracted strings from the man 
pages).

Regards,

Jordi Vilalta