[Qt5-feedback] Translation in Qt5

[David Faure]

On Thursday 30 June 2011, Konrad Rosenbaum wrote:
> On Wednesday 29 June 2011, David Faure wrote:
> > On Wednesday 29 June 2011, Konstantin Tokarev wrote:
> > > 29.06.2011, 03:30, "John Layt" <jlayt at kde.org>:
> > > > * In Qt5 should remove forced context from Qt to restore
> > > > compatability with all other translation systems.
> > > 
> > > Automatic context is a great feature of Qt translation systm, please
> > > don't remove it.
> > 
> > What is great about it? IIRC it's typically set to a C++ classname, and
> > translators don't typically know these names at all.
> 
> Then maybe we need some way to annotate class names for translators. In my
> projects I use contexts extensively, because sometimes translation can
> depend on context.

And that's exactly what the "comment" is about, or can be about if used 
extensively.
In KDE we don't have automatic (classname-based) context, instead we use KUIT.
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Localization/i18n_Semantics
See example below.

> Another use case is customized localization. For one of my projects the
> customer maintains his own localization file to adapt program output to the
> vocabulary that the users are accustomed to and to make it more verbose. So
> for example in one dialog it translates "Cancel" to "Abort this
> transaction" and in another to "Return to main window". ...

Exactly. And a classname isn't enough information to know this, you need a 
proper "hint for translators". For instance:

i18n("@action:button Abort Transaction", "Cancel")
vs
i18n("@action:button Return to Mainwindow", "Cancel")

Qt can already do that, with the "disambiguation" argument to tr().
Let's not mix disambiguation with automatic classname-based contexts.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Sponsored by Nokia to work on KDE, incl. Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org).