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

[From: Murray Cumming]

On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 15:25 +0200, Kalle Vahlman wrote:
> 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 ;).

String freezes should fix this problem. And in extreme cases, you can,
for instance, change the English U.S. translation, and leave the string
wrong in the C locale.

A change of meaning in an original _should_ be translated.

> 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).

I can put "this_app_warns_about_this" in regular source code, and the
effect will be the same. It doesn't help me if, when I think up the
correct text, I have to put it in a separate file instead of in the
source code. Why would we want to not change the source code?

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc at murrayc.com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com