[Qgis-developer] Looking for advices to avoid breaking translated strings

[DelazJ]

Hi all,

The thread "Typos and inconsistencies in source text"  (hence its issue
report at  https://github.com/qgis/qgis3_UIX_discussion/issues/19) has
revealed an important number of issues related to spelling of translatable
strings.
While I agree that fixing those issues will give more consistency in QGIS
(at least for developers and English-speaking users) I am still concerned
about the overwork for the translation team and am looking for the best way
to do it in order to have less impact on localized QGIS.

Let's take a reported typo: "cellsize" instead of "cell size". If I check
Transifex, we currently have 19 strings that contain this word. So if the
replacements are done in QGIS source files, when these ones are pushed to
transifex, these strings will be replaced and because of this tiny
difference, the translations already done for ALL languages will be
deconnected, hence lost.
But actually, those fixes don't change the meaning of the string. And
translations are done according to the meaning. So, despite the typos in
the english texts, translated ones were (and still are) valid. But they'll
be lost and the dialog in QGIS will be displayed in English until some
translator reapplies the same translation.

But there's not only "cellsize" typo; we have rationalize, analyze,
flavour, behaviour, favourite, neighbour, cancelled, check-box, and many
other spelling issues...
I do not think that all languages have enough active translators to redo
their work. So is there a way to keep translations?

I've been thinking about a process and wonder if it'll work (and will
require someone with write access):
- Pull translations from Transifex
- have a PR in which besides fixing strings in the source code, their
duplicate in /i18n folder are also fixed. In this case the .ts file
contains the cleaned text linked to the existing translation
- then merge the commit
- and push it again to transifex

Would that work? Opinions?

Regards,
Harrissou
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/attachments/20161222/aa500065/attachment-0001.html>