Comments on: Updating Localization Notes

By: Dwayne Bailey

Dwayne Bailey — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:41:52 +0000

moz2po will also match a note to the entity or key that follows it. In my experience the notes are mostly badly formatted or out of date to do proper matching.

So yip we’ll choke on the example @Axel gave. But a translator looking at ‘tender’ is most likely going to miss that note and any notes that apply to the whole file.

By: Axel Hecht

Axel Hecht — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:45:51 +0000

That does pose a problem for notes like

# Localization Note (foo, bar, tender): This is just a test
foo: one string
bar: another
tender: wow, yet another string.

Right?

By: Alexandru Szasz

Alexandru Szasz — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:08:26 +0000

In Narro I assume that a localization note regardless of the way it is formatted and what it contains refers to the next entity. Which is how programmers usually work when commenting code.

By: Julen

Julen — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:06:05 +0000

Well, isn't already documented how to write localization notes? The other thing is what developers are actually doing...

By: Neil Rashbrook

Neil Rashbrook — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:27:56 +0000

Worse still, that comment is out of date, because it’s now Ctrl+Shift+U that’s reserved.

By: Axel Hecht

Axel Hecht — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:02:44 +0000

Actually, localization notes are documented at https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Localization_notes.

The question of what works and what doesn’t work is a sad story, actually. For example, pootle doesn’t support file-wide localization notes, even though Dwayne totally thinks that they’re the right tool to offer localization primers, or are a great tool to say “feel free to leave XSLT error message in English if there’s no eco-system around that standard in your language.”

So it’s not so much a question of just what works, but what should work as well.

The story about sequences of entities with localization notes is a bit tougher, and not really documented. I think the comma-separated list works for now.

We’re keeping the question of comments on l10n files on the top of our heads when talking about l20n, fwiw, so if/when we switch, things should improve in this regard as well.

By: seth bindernagel

seth bindernagel — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:27:59 +0000

Hey Phil, Good idea. Ah…bless the quarterly goal system. Perhaps I’ll set that as one in the coming quarters: Documenting a policy on how to write localization notes. Appreciate the feedback.

By: Phil Ringnalda

Phil Ringnalda — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:21:22 +0000

It would be unimaginably wonderful if someone would actually document what does and doesn’t work with l10n notes: the tree is chock-full of examples (by which I don’t mean “examples which all do the same thing the same way” but “dozens of different incompatible ways”) of notes for entire files, and notes for multiple keys, and various sorts of wrapping and whitespace and punctuation for single-key notes, going back to the dawn of l10n time, with absolutely no guidance that I’ve ever seen on what actually does and doesn’t work.