[Development] [Interest] Direct-lookup translation, even for English (was Re: get english translation)

[Saether Jan-Arve]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: development-bounces+jan-arve.saether=digia.com at qt-project.org
> [mailto:development-bounces+jan-arve.saether=digia.com at qt-project.org]
> On Behalf Of Thiago Macieira
> Sent: 3. september 2014 18:11
> To: development at qt-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Development] [Interest] Direct-lookup translation, even 
> for English (was Re: get english translation)
> On Wednesday 03 September 2014 07:16:22 Saether Jan-Arve wrote:
>> We could do that, but I don't see the problem in providing the
>> translation file. Shawn already mentioned many good reasons for why
>> translating the "engineering English" to "end user English"
>> (whatever that is) is a good thing. (Note - you don't need to
>> provide translations for everything)
> 
> The problem is actually shipping and loading such a file.
Somebody already suggested to embed it as a resource, isn't that good enough?

> 
> Imagine an application that is only run in English (no L10n) and for
> which the source code has proper, English messages. Will it occur to
> the developers that they have to provide the en_US translation file
> from Qt?
> 
> No, it won't. We need to get rid of that file.
If we get rid of it we have to provide an alternative way of providing those plural forms, preferably in some language-agnostic API (since Qt does not constrain you to write your source text in English). Unfortunately there are up to 6 different "plural forms" in some languages, and the rules to know which to pick differs greatly depending on the language.

 
..or alternatively we need to be clarify our documentation to explicitly mention that this plural-form-translation feature requires a translation to be installed, even in English.

One only need to provide a translation file for the case you are describing if the application developer uses the plural translation feature. If that feature is not used, the translation file is not needed in your case.
I assume if an application developer uses that feature, he should also have read its documentation. And if his plural translations doesn't work I would expect him to read that part again. And if he still doesn't manage to deploy the translation file after that, the user will still see "Found 1 item(s)" instead of "Found 1 item", which is not the end of the world, really.

> 
> PS: I can't find it. Shouldn't we have at least one in qttranslations?

Prior to this discussion I would say yes. Right now it depends on if we need to get rid of it ;-D
Since I'm not yet convinced, I would still vote for adding it.

Jan Arve