[Gambas-user] Some questions about project Translation

[RICHARD WALKER]

Greetings to all,

I have been experimenting with the Translate option in the IDE. Just
for fun, I took a current mini-project which is nearing completion and
marked it up for translation. At only 116 strings it is not too
daunting a task. To make it even easier I elected to start with a
translation from English to American.

In my first attempt I used the "This string must not be translated"
option ("-") rather a lot. I noticed that there are actually many
little strings which should not be translated whatever the target
language might be. Typical of these are short strings like "flac" or
"mp3" which find their way into the list, but may be regarded as
invariant.

I tried again using the "Copy untranslated string" option and used "-"
for the aforementioned little strings and some other abbreviations and
the program name.

Then I noticed some repetitive phrases like "Click to enable [some
feature or other]", and their "disable" counterparts.

                                                         -=o0o=-

So I was wondering, does it make sense to re-code a project so that
strings, or string constants are used for repeated fragments of text?
Might such an approach actually make it harder to translate
"sentences" made of these fragments into some languages?

As an alternative, does the translation mechanism used have any sort
of dictionary of phrases? For example, in a form design I may set some
text as a tool-tip. In the program I may alter the tool-tip and later
restore its original text. That could give me two or more instances of
the same text to translate.

What is the "correct" way to use the "-" translation option? Is it
preferable to find the occurrences of the short strings I identified
and find a way to keep them from being listed for translation? I
realise that the project is scanned and the "from" list is built for
each translation episode so using "-" to mark strings to be preserved
whatever the target language is a step which must be taken for each
translation. Is there a need for a markup in the project to say "never
translate" so that these strings are automatically given the "-"
translation?

And finally, in examining my code for translatable strings I realised
that I had made extensive and vital use of text written by various
shell commands and captured for analysis/action in various Process
Read and Error handlers. That started me wondering how to handle this
situation in another language where the text written by these
processes would likely be very different from what I was expecting.
Any ideas?

I welcome any opinions from people who have made more extensive use of
the Gambas IDE Project Translate option than I have.

Richard