GNOME Goal: Remove markup in translatable messages

Guidelines

Remove surrounding HTML markup in translatable messages. This is less error-prone for translators, avoids an unnecessary burden for the translators since the markup should not be translated anyway, and makes translation tools, like translation databases, more efficient in finding and reusing translations.

More often than not, the problematic messages come from Glade. This required fixes in Glade and GTK+, see 97061. This has now been fixed in Glade3 and GTK+ trunk, which now support attribute parsing and editors.

How does it affect translators?

In .pot files, messages like this appear:

when they should really only be:

This is much less error-prone for translators, avoids an unnecessary burden for the translators since the markup should not be translated anyway, and makes translation tools, like translation databases, more efficient in finding and reusing translations.

Tricky cases

It can be hard to fix cases where the markup is embedded in the middle of a longer string, such as

msg = "Unfortunately GNOME 3 failed to start properly and started in the <i>fallback mode</i>"

You could try to eliminate the markup using a construction like

s = g_strdup_printf ("<i>%s</i>", _("fallback mode"));
/* Translators, %s stands for 'fallback mode' here */
msg = g_strdup_printf _("Unfortunately GNOME 3 failed to start properly and started in the %s"), s);
g_free (s);

But this is considerably more clumsy than the embedded markup version, and you may well introduce memory leaks and new 'split string' translation issues this way.

If in doubt, it is best to seek advice from translators on gnome-i18n@gnome.org.

How to fix a module?

By using the new features from Glade3 and GTK+, problematic markup can be removed from GLade messages, which helps translators.

Comments before approval

ChPe: This only works with the GtkBuilder format, not with libglade. So this depends on another Gnome goal being done first: GnomeGoals/RemoveLibGladeUseGtkBuilder

Status of this goal

Note: Automatically updated stats can be found at http://people.gnome.org/~fpeters/reports/remove-markup-in-messages.html