Re: Translating properties?

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi Alexandre;

this would also be a good topic for discussion on desktop-devel, to
gather feedback from maintainers as well.

On 31 August 2015 at 19:10, Alexandre Franke <alexandre franke gmail com> wrote:

> So I noticed recently quite some activity related to (not) translating
> properties. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=754324 is an
> example. There I read "visible only in developer tools like Glade and
> gtk-inspector […] and therefore shouldn't be marked for translation".
> I tend to disagree with that, as even developers using Glade and
> gtk-inspector may want to use tools in their language. Also the bug
> report says "no other app in GNOME does that" but we have a dedicated
> domain in GTK+ for that.
>
> I don't see a relevant guide about this at
> https://wiki.gnome.org/TranslationProject/DevGuidelines and whatever
> we decide, we should have something there.
>
> So… what do you say?

Some background: descriptions and user-readable names for GLib and
GTK+ properties are used by default to build the UI in Glade, which
means that they have to be translated unless we want the Glade UI to
be half-localised. Glade has the ability to import widgets from
different libraries as well, which is why libraries providing widgets
should have a Glade catalog file describing those classes, *and*
localise the strings for their properties.

If a library is private, does not provide widgets, or does not provide
a catalog for Glade, then those strings should not be localised; on
the other hand, I really think that any library inside GNOME that is
installed in a public location and that provides widgets, should
*really* have a Glade catalog file for those widgets, to let
developers use them. Obviously, that imposes a certain set of
restrictions on the libraries — like API stability, and parallel
installability — that not every maintainer is willing to commit to,
for good reasons.

So, I guess the question is:

 - which applications provide a public library in the GNOME stack?
 - which of these libraries provide widget classes?
 - which of these libraries are committed to a certain level of stability?
 - which of these libraries also come with a Glade catalog file?

In my opinion, anything that falls outside these criteria should not
mark the property strings as translatable; if the first three
requirements are satisfied (publicly available and API stable widgets)
then the library should come with a Glade catalog file, and have their
properties marked as translatable.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
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