openerp-expert-localization team mailing list archive

[Olivier Dony <odo@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Note: as this discussion is relevant for all translation teams, I am 
CC'ing the localization list.

On 2010-01-11 at 23:18, Thorsten Vocks wrote :
> regarding translations.
>
> * at the moment i translate directly in launchpad (remaining strings). I
> recognized a lot of terms, which was already translated shown as
> untranslated once again.
<...>
> I can show you a very good example with two simple screenshots.
> Screenshot 1 is showing the correctly translated and displayed help text
> for sale order form (comming from rc2 download version).
> Screenshot 2 is showing that this term is currently displayed as "not
> translated" in rosetta.

Thanks for the screenshots! Unfortunately, this is not a bug, but due to 
the fact that some menu tips were changed and improved recently.
As a consequence, the next time we exported the translations, the old 
menu tips were discarded, and the new ones were added instead.
In your example, the menu tip for sale order, the english text was 
changed[1] at revision 4169:

From:
"Sales Orders helps you manage quotations and orders done with your 
customers. (...)"

Tp:
"Sales Orders help you manage quotations and orders from your customers. 
(...)"

Notice the difference: "helps"->"help", "done with"->"from your", etc.

Any change to original english terms will always cause the translations 
to be discarded, even for small differences, because the original text 
is used as the "key". This is something common to all translation 
systems where the original text is the key, and so far there is no 
solution but to re-translate the new text.
Luckily, you can always look at version history to see what was the 
previous translation, or use the fact that Rosetta puts the discarded 
translations in comments at the bottom of PO files, for that very 
purpose (obsolete translations are prefixed with "#~"). See [2], at the 
bottom, around line 3215.
I don't know of any way to see this directly in the Rosetta web UI, and 
it makes sense because Rosetta has no way to know what to display.


Quick technical discussion:

We could imagine changing this behavior in the future to switch to 
translation keys (msgid) in the form "sale.order.menu.tip" or something 
similar. However this would mean we lose some advantages, like:
- fast localization of developments (no need to choose keys and create 
the default translation, just use _(... ))
- code readability (english text is in the source directly, no need to 
go somewhere else to see it). We could try to workaround that by 
generating the keys in the PO[T] while keeping original source in 
english, but I'm afraid there's no silver bullet to auto-generate the 
keys in a way that will be as stable as if we hardcoded them manually.
- Rosetta allows us to benefit from translations from other Launchpad 
projects only because we share the same translation keys. For long 
sentences the advantage is small, but there are many small ones too, and 
we would lose the suggestions there as well. See also the Rosetta 
FAQs[3], which (as I understand it) means that msgid values are supposed 
to be in US English.


[1] 
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~openerp/openobject-addons/trunk/revision/4169/sale/i18n/sale.pot
[2] 
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~openerp/openobject-addons/trunk/revision/4184/sale/i18n/de.po
[3] https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+faq/394



> I am nearly sure that we lost a lot of mostly complex strings between
> 31.12. and today  (i would assume more than 100 complex strings). Maybe
> there is a chance to fix this in rosetta.

Looking at the bottom of current PO files can give you a quick overview 
of whatever translations were recently discarded. But keep in mind that 
many of them have been removed for good in order to get rid of useless 
terms, not just spell-checked or improved, so it's normal to see a lot 
of things there.


> Last remaining issues i see at the moment in the modules list
> (Administration/Modules/Modules) in a lot of short descriptions and
> descriptions.

What you see is probably a consequence of the current limitation of the 
module-based translations in OpenERP: module descriptions and short 
descriptions are part of the i18n data of the module itself, to respect 
modularity principles. As a consequence, these are only translated once 
the module is installed!
This is not a big deal with v6.0, as the configuration wizards are 
correctly translated (being installed in their own modules), so going to 
the modules list is not required anymore, and should be mostly for 
further technical tuning of the database.
And if you need to install an additional module later, chances are you 
can just click on the "Reconfigure" shortcut and select it in the 
appropriate config wizard.


Hope this helps...

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