Re: Emacs i18n

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Mar 8, 2019, at 7:29, Juri Linkov <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> The PO format is best suited for translation of one-liners like
> messages and menu items, but I doubt that the PO format would be the most 
> efficient implementation for multi-line doc strings since gettext uses the 
> whole text of the doc string as a key to translation.
> Whereas more efficient would be to use a Lisp symbol (function or variable 
> name) as a translation key.

po4a is a commonly used perl utility that creates po files from a number of 
documentation formats including texinfo. The msgid is indeed the paragraph 
itself but nobody sees any "efficiency" issue in the process.

Since the emacs code is not a documentation format, there would be a need to 
find a different way to extract the doc strings, but using each doc string 
paragraph as a msgid is not a problem in itself.

Let's not forget that most if not all issues regarding formats and processes on 
the l10n side have mostly been solved decades ago.

I think what really needs to be discussed is:

• which strings do we extract
• how to rewrite the mix of code and strings
• how to extract the resulting strings
• how to process the translations for display in emacs


Jean-Christophe Helary
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http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune