Re: Document translations broken in Texinfo 7.0.90?

[Patrice Dumas]

Hello,

As a preamble, I may have missed something, but to me this issue should
only affect users using the development version before the translations
are updated, normally for the official release.  So, I amy be missing
something, but to me this is an issue that should be solved with the
official realease.  It could also be that translations are not all
updated for the official release, in which case it would be more
problematic.


On Wed, Aug 30, 2023 at 04:55:28PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> These contexts have broken all of these translations, possibly for
> no present benefit (it would have a benefit in the future if the word
> "Next" had to be translated in more than one way in different contexts
> in some language).

It was added when the strings were short and there could be ambiguity,
which was, in my opinion, quite often with directions, but also to have
an API for strings customization that would be consistent.

> If translators provide updated translations that include the contexts, then
> the translations will work again.

Indeed, to me it is not different from a change in translated strings,
it should be resolved with translators updating the translations, and
normally they should be presented with the previous translation that was
there before the context was added.  The only difference is the
magnitude of the change, many strings have been invalidated at once.

> I wonder if there is anything that can be done with the gettext API to
> try for a translation both with and without a context.  What occurs to
> me is testing the return value of pgettext, seeing if it is equal to the
> input string, and if it is (so the translation failed), calling gettext
> instead (without the context).

That could be a transitory measure to wait for translations to be
updated.  We could do that in particular if we notice that many
translations are not updated for the official release.

> Another option, I guess, would be to post-process the files we get from
> the Translation Project (https://translationproject.org/html/welcome.html)
> somehow to add these contexts in.

I think that we should not do that, it is up to the translators to
decide what to translate also based on the contexts.

-- 
Pat