Adding contextual information to a localized build
A volunteer from the Tanzanian Linux User Group passed me this blog post that describes a tool he created to help localizers with context of strings in the Firefox user interface. As Alberto writes,
“It is difficult to translate something that you have never used before, functionalities that the translation team is not familiar with or English words that can be understood in several ways.”
His tool allows a localizer to add tags to each string so that when the localizer builds Firefox locally, they can see the translation with a tag in the UI. If the translation seems incorrect in the context, the localizer can use the tag to find the file that needs adjustment. See the screen shot below and check out his post for more information.
Leave a Reply
Sorry, your screenshot doesn’t enlarge when you click on it, so it is unreadable.
Readers inspired by this use of podebug might also want to try the following before translating.
I use podebug to help define the priorities of what to translate in Firefox. My definition of what is most important is based on what I believe a user will use most frequently and will see most often. These are my goals. With the English text tagged using podebug it is then easy to see the text, to see which file it comes from and then assign that file to a given goal to create a list of files and goals.
These goals are what’s directing our current Northern Sotho translation effort.
I started a series on my blog about podebug that generates these types of translations. We recently improved it some more for the upcoming release of the Translate Toolkit. There are different ways in which this is useful: not just for translators, but also for developers to test the translatability of what they write. The feature shown here (to add information about the origin of the string) is the topic of my latest post.