[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Identifiers instead of English strings

[From: Kalle Vahlman]

On 2/17/06, David D. Hagood <wowbagger at sktc.net> wrote:
> Murray Cumming wrote:
> > Is there some explanation somewhere about the use of these strange
> > identifiers instead of English strings in the maemo source code. What is
> > the advantage?
> >
>
> Internationalization (I18N) - the strings are kept in a set of  separate
> files, one for each language. The code then accesses that file to get
> the string. Thus, you create a new file, and suddenly your app speaks
> Spanish.

That would be possible for normal language (usually english) too, no
need for special IDs.

AFAIK the id's are there for few reasons, one being that any
mistypings or phrase changes in the original version won't mean a
change for all the translations already done. This would be bad if
there's 10 translations, all handled by different people (as I'm sure
open source translators know ;).

Also the code side benefits as you can quickly add a string called
"this_app_warns_about_this" instead of waiting for the real and
perfect sentence to be thought up, since it can be done after the code
is already done (without changes to it).

--
Kalle Vahlman, zuh at iki.fi
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