[Interest] Translating plural with is/are

[Thiago Macieira]

On terça-feira, 8 de março de 2016 19:14:08 PST André Somers wrote:
> > 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.

Another trick that KDE uses is to have an extra translation called "x-test" 
which is the same as the English version, with "xx" before and after the 
translation.

$ grep -F '[x-' /usr/share/applications/org.kde.k3b.desktop 
GenericName[x-test]=xxDisk Burningxx
Comment[x-test]=xxDisk writing programxx
Name[x-test]=xxK3bxx

If you load that translation file, you'll be able to tell which strings in your 
application are not translatable. It will also catch mistakes like composing a 
phrase with translated data, like

	tr("The file ") + name + tr(" was not found");

This would show up as "xxThe file xx/etc/passwdxx was not foundxx".

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center