I just got a new bug titled
Very weird translation template, need
comments in .pot file to clarify, and giggled to myself. I was
wondering how long it would be for this bug to be filed. The problem is that
whilst most of the translatable strings in Tasks are pretty boring: "Tasks",
"today", "Priority" and so on, all of a sudden the template goes a bit mental:
"^(?<task>.+) (?:by due on)? (?<month>\\w+) (?<day>\\d 1,2 )(?:st nd rd th)?$"
Apparently the average translator doesn't think that learning PCRE-style
regular expressions, and reading the source that uses this string to understand
how it is to be used, is appropriate. [note: this is sarcasm]
Maybe I should have added some translator comments to clarify exactly what I
meant by this. These monster strings (all in
koto-date-parser.c)
are
GRegex regular expressions which are used to parse the user's
input to try and extract meaningful date information. To translate these
strings you'll need to have a basic understanding of regular expressions: if
you don't then skip them and hopefully someone who does will finish the
translation. If you know regular expressions then translating these strings
is easy, honest.
The golden rule is to never translate the words which look like
this:
(?<foo>. These are markers which identify portions of
the input (such as task or month) and need to remain in English, although they
can be moved around if required. The rest of the strings are translatable.
I'll give an example using the French translation by Stéphane
Raimbault. First, the string in English and a worked example:
"^(?<task>.+) (?:by due on)? (?<day>\\d 1,2 )(?:st nd rd th)? (?<month>\\w+)$"
First, we have a sequence of any characters identified
as
task, which magically expands to be as many as possible. This is
optionally followed by one of the words "by", "due" or "on". This is followed
by one or two digits identified as
day followed by "st", "nd", "rd"
or "th". Finally a sequence of characters which is identified
as
month. If the user had entered "pay
bills on 2nd june" then
task would be "pay bills",
day would
be "2", and
month would be "june". Tasks can then turn "june" into a
month number through other translations, and it now knows what date the user
entered. In French, this translates as follows:
"^(?<task>.+) (?:pour pr vu pour le)? (?<day>\\d 1,2 )(?:er e)? (?<month>\\w+)$"
See, I said it was easy! All I need now is a legion of translators who
understand regular expressions enough to correctly translate the new Tasks... [this, again, is sarcasm]
Luckily, plans are afoot to move the Tasks source to the GNOME Subversion
server, so the full fury of the GNOME translation team can attack this.
NP: Trailer Park, Beth Orton
