[josm-dev] translating in Launchpad

[Dirk Stöcker]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2011, Jo wrote:

> I'm working on the translation of strings towards Dutch in launchpad. I
> noticed that some strings have comments. With English being a language where
> one spelling of a word is very often ambiguous, it would help a lot to know
> what part of speech a given term is:
>
> "Content" can be a noun or an adjective and of course the translation of
> either is completely different.
>
> This is an obvious one in two ways. Of course here the noun meaning is
> wanted.
>
> Very often with verbs there is ambiguity between the infinitive and the
> present tense (3rd person excluded).
>
> In other instances it's not clear whether it's an adjective or a past
> participle.
>
> Can I add to these comments somewhere myself? In order to disambiguate them?
>
> Also, what if I find an error in the English string? Can I report that
> somewhere or can I correct it myself directly?

Everything you request must be reported in JOSM trac. And best would 
always be if combined with a patch fixing the issue.

Regarding the comments: There are two ways to handle this. First is to add 
a comment in front of the string. This is then taken by the language 
string extraction tools and passed to launchpad. This also applies, when 
the strings itself is not understandable enough to be translated properly.

If two equal english strings are joined although translations would 
differ, then we need to add a context to one or both of them. The contexts 
allow to handle them as two different strings (Using trc() instead of 
tr()).

Both methods are only used when required, so please report issues you find 
and we will fix them to improve translations.

Ciao
-- 
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)