[Interest] Translating plural with is/are

[André Somers]

Op 08/03/2016 om 20:08 schreef Jason H:
>
>> Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2016 at 1:14 PM
>> From: "André Somers" <andre at familiesomers.nl>
>> To: interest at qt-project.org
>> Subject: Re: [Interest] Translating plural with is/are
>>
>>
>>
>> Op 08/03/2016 om 18:17 schreef Thiago Macieira:
>>> On terça-feira, 8 de março de 2016 09:06:14 PST Frédéric Marchal wrote:
>>>> If for instance I write tr("%n whatever rubbish I type here", "", n)
>>>> and the translator decides to translate "%n whatever rubbish I insert
>>>> here" with "One message was saved" for singular and "%n messages were
>>>> saved" for plural, then, the user will see those last two strings. The
>>>> user will never see the original "%n whatever rubbish I insert here"
>>>> string from the source code.
>>> When Nokia used Qt, we used to call this translating from "Engineering
>>> English" to "proper English". In some projects, the source strings always
>>> started with "!!", which helped identify what wasn't yet translated in pre-
>>> release builds.
>>>
>> That's actually pretty nice. Also helps to automatically find missing
>> translations popping up in the GUI using Squish or a similar tool.
>
> That's the kind of insight that should be documented :-)
> It's a fantastic idea that isn't obvious at first.
Thanks.
I looked into this exact problem when writing squish tests before, but I 
could not solve this one at the time. I _did_ solve a related issue: 
flagging problematic translations that take more space than is available 
for the widget the text is supposed to appear on. Helped us find lots of 
problems in translations/the ui design where texts were truncated a bit. 
I think something like that got added to squish later on, but we did it 
before that moment.

André