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Re: Tricky question with translation

 

On 11/27/2012 08:33 PM, Philippe wrote:

The problem we have is with the non breaking spaces. The french
translators guidelines tell us to put [nbsp] to represent them. But the
.po file produced by launchpad replace them with the real non-breaking
space caracter " " and not the LaTeX code "~". This causes a problem
with the LaTeX package in charge of the french typography who add an
estra non-breaking space in some part.

My concern is I don't know where is the best place to fix this problem.
- In launchpad, where it should be great if it replaces the " " by LaTeX
equivalent "~" in the generated .po ?
- In po4a-translate (I don't know if this tool can do this kind of job) ?
- In the LaTeX package for it to understand the " " as a "~" and stop
adding extra spaces ?
- In our French translators guideline, and ask them to not use [nbsp] on
LaTeX translations ?

I'm sorry to hear about the problem. I don't think we could teach Launchpad to represent non-breaking spaces differently in every format without making mistakes and complicating things more. We used to try and support as many formats as we could, but found it made for more trouble in the long term.

So po4a-translate sounds to me like the right place to solve this. It knows the input format and it knows the output format. I don't know much about po4a, but from what you say it makes sense for po4a to know about unicode non-breaking spaces, and have a sensible translation for them.


Jeroen


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