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

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 8:50 PM, Dirk Stöcker<openstreetmap at dstoecker.de> wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Feb 2009, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Without changes to the code itself for each language you will never be able
> to support non-english languages with perfect grammar and translations. We
> will have to live with that fact. It is a compromise between different
> requirements. So in case there is really no possibility to translate
> clashing texts in a useful way we will try to find a solution in the
> original strings. All the other 20 included translations have same problems
> and we somehow solved them. I'm always for improving the english original as
> well but I will not optimize JOSM for one specific language.

Launchpad now supports the msgctxt key which allows one to workaround
the issue of the English original strings being used as a unique key:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/rosetta/+bug/6034

Here's a comparison of it and some of the previous hacks in use:

http://leonardof.org/2007/12/01/context-in-gnome-translations/en/

And here's how it can be used in the source code itself:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2007-November/msg00097.html

I don't know if the Java gettext-commons library supports this however.