[Sugar-devel] "Howtos" within Sugar Activities (was: Potential volunteer offering technical writing)

[Chris Leonard]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:51 AM, samy boutayeb <s.boutayeb at free.fr> wrote:

> Le mardi 11 octobre 2011 à 10:23 -0400,
> sugar-devel-request at lists.sugarlabs.org a écrit :
> > Also, by including even simple help strings, the burden on the
> > translator when from a few hundred single-word strings to many many
> > long sentences. Even so, the real explanations are found in the wiki.
> >
>
> More strings equal more work but, at the same time, more useful
> contextual information! This is a big plus for the translator as it
> helps disambiguïse short commands/menus/strings from the user interface!
>
> Generally speaking, a carefully designed help system (regardless of its
> form) is a courtesy for the end users!
>
>
>
A careful design of help might include some tagging that would make it
possible separate help strings from "essential"  UI strings to allow for
generation of separate PO files.

This sort of issue has been acknowledged in the GNOME upstream by the
production of "reduced" PO files that leave out the plentiful GConf UI
strings (as described in the post below).

http://translate.org.za/blogs/friedel/en/content/better-lies-about-gnome-localisation

An approach like this splits the difference between overloading the
localizer with strings to complete for a "usefully" translated version of
the activity and making the UI so terse that users have a hard time figuring
out how to use it without an external reference.

cjl
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