Obscure texts and invalid translations

[Frédéric Delanoy]

2012/2/22 Lauri Kenttä <lauri.kentta at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
>
> Wine has many texts, especially error messages, that are almost impossible
> to translate without knowing what they're really about. Some are also easy
> to misunderstand.
>
> An example from dlls/kernel32/winerror.mc:
> msgid "Notify change request in progress.\n"
>
> Some interpretations:
> de, nb: "A request for notifications about changes is in progress."
> fr, sv: "A request to change a notification is in progress."
> it, pt: Both have their own versions, I think.
>
> There are many more such cases, although the difference is usually in only
> one or two languages. (Unfortunately it didn't occur to me to put them down
> from the beginning, so I can't give you a list. I'll just mention "Challenge
> Password" before I forget that, too.)
>
> 1) What should I do if I wanted to clarify a msgid? Just change the original
> .rc file?
Adding a message context. Wine translating page
(http://wiki.winehq.org/Translating) has some info on this. Not sure
if it applies to winerror messages, though

> 2) Is there a way to add helpful comments to all language files at once
> without changing the msgid?
See above

> 3) What should I do if I spot a suspicious translation? Spam the Bugzilla,
> contact the Last-Translator personally

Last-Translator is not reliable. It might be updated by some
tools/manually, but it's not guaranteed.
You can use git-blame to find the last author of a specific line
Spamming bugzilla is not an option IMO.

> , or send patches to add #fuzzy comments and hope I'm right?
If you only *hope* to be right, don't send such patches

> And if it's wrong in many of the languages I
> can read, it's probably wrong in some others as well; who would check them
> all?
Their respective translators. Sadly many translations are not that
well maintained.

> 4) There has been discussions about some translation websites. Is there a
> chance that such a website would allow easy tagging of potential errors?

Problem is attribution of changes to respective authors (+ potential
license conflicts). Search the wine-devel archives for more info.
> --
> Lauri Kenttä

Frédéric