I’m in the process of updating the Norwegian translation of darktable, and there are a few things that I struggle with. I use Poedit to translate.
The default in darktable is to start any string with a lower case letter. This is fine, but it creates new problems, since Poedit detects if a string starts with upper or lower case and wants original and translation to start in the same way. In some cases the original starts with an upper case letter and a correct translation will have to start with lower case. An example is the name of the months. English month names start with upper case, norwegian month names start with lower case. Same with languages. And if the original starts with “OpenCL” or “ICC” and the translation won’t have those words in the beginning, Poedit complains. So my question is: will these inconsistencies have any consequence or is it only an issue for Poedit itself? And how to deal with it if I have to?
Also, in the tooltip for the tags dictionary in the tagging module, there is this: “shift+Enter idem plus gives the focus to entry”. This is completely meaningless to me. What does “idem plus” mean? Is it a typo in the original string or what?
The “idem” refers to the previous line in that tooltip. It avoids having to repeat that rather long text. So the “idem plus” means: “in addition to the action described above, it also does the following”.
For the issue with Poedit: does Poedit refuse the “inconsistent” translations, or just warn about them? A warning is justified if in most cases the construction is incorrect. But warnings shouldn’t be used for anything critical (then it’s an error), so you can ignore them if you decide the construct is correct in your situation.
As this is about translated strings, I don’t expect any consequences when running darktable with the translation (apart from possible user complaints about faulty translations, of course)
One more question. In Preferences > Shortcuts, there are some tooltips with a section that I have not been able to translate, as it seems to not be available in the .po file.
Is this intentional, a bug or the fault of my little brain not being able to figure out stuff?
Things like this can ruin the impression of a good, clean translation, so it would be good to avoid.
Yeah, I think I’ll try with “styrke”, which is the same as German “Stärke” and see if that makes more sense.
But this is also closer to “strength” than “force”, I think. Maybe also the original author is not a native English-speaker, so it might be a less than optimal choice of words. That’s why I would like to know the intention of the word, as it would be easier to find the right translation.