[josm-dev] Trouble translating JOSM: Same strings used in different places

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 8:16 PM, Dirk Stöcker
<openstreetmap at dstoecker.de> wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Feb 2009, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
>
>>  Car->Parking
>>  Car->Rental
>>  Bicycle->Parking
>>  Bicycle->Rental
>>
>> I translated tr("Parking") as "Bílastæði" (literally: "Car-parking")
>> which of course made "Car-parking" a sub-item of the Bicycle menu
>> which should have "Hjólastæði" (literally "Bicycle-parking").
>
> We cannot introduce context in the presets file, so we would need to change
> the texts. For the main application we could introduce contexts, but I would
> like to avoid that and rather change texts as well.
>
> That's why I ask for specific descriptions and not examples. Best would be a
> changed english text as well. But keep in mind that each change means 20
> translators have to change their texts as well, so always remember that no
> translation will fit 100%. If you cannot work around, we will change code if
> possible. Otherwise you will have to deal with the issues :-)

What sort of code change would solve this specific issue (other than
switching away from .po). Is there something in the gettext-commons
API that I'm missing? If you have tr("Edit") in two places it'll be
picked up as the same string by the .po utilities.

> Your Edit/Edit problem is one, where really find no better distinguishable
> words, as both are well established standards.

Both are well established standards in English whereas other languages
might have other well established standards. The two incidentally
being the same in English carrying over to other languages is a
systemic problem of the translation system which needs to be solved,
as it'll only get worse the more languages we have.